Aude ambroggi biography of christopher columbus

Christopher Columbus began his maritime career as a teenager, participating in several trading voyages across the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. In his twenties, he settled in Lisbon, where he married Filipa Perestrelo and fathered a son, Diego. During this time, Columbus developed his expertise in sailing and navigation, gaining valuable experience that would later inform his transatlantic expeditions.

His adventurous spirit led him to attempt a daring voyage across the Atlantic, motivated by his desire to find a westward route to Asia, which he believed would provide quicker access to the lucrative spice markets of the East. Columbus's quest for a new maritime route faced significant challenges; his first major Atlantic expedition in was nearly fatal when his ship was attacked by French privateers.

Undeterred, Columbus continued to refine his navigational techniques and studied ocean currents that could facilitate his planned voyage. After years of lobbying, he finally gained the support of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, who agreed to sponsor his journey. Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer known for his ambitious voyages, achieved remarkable successes in his quest for a new route to Asia.

His expedition marked a pivotal moment in history, as he became the first European to make contact with the Americas. His landfall in the Bahamas not only opened the door to further exploration but also signaled the start of European colonization in the New World. Columbus' voyages prompted significant exchanges of culture and goods, now referred to as the Columbian Exchange, fundamentally altering global trade and interaction.

However, Columbus faced numerous challenges during and after his expeditions. Despite his initial acclaim, his governance of the settlements he established was marred by poor leadership and harsh treatment of Indigenous peoples, resulting in conflict and resistance. Subsequent voyages revealed the stark realities of colonial exploitation and the devastating impact of introduced diseases on native populations.

Compounded by mismanagement, complaints from settlers led to his arrest and loss of authority, showcasing the difficulties of sustaining exploration efforts in the face of political and social obstacles. Ultimately, Columbus' legacy is a complex tapestry—a journey of exploration intertwined with the consequences of colonization and the suffering of Indigenous cultures.

By sailing due west from the Canary Islands during hurricane season , skirting the so-called horse latitudes of the mid-Atlantic, he risked being becalmed and running into a tropical cyclone , both of which he avoided by chance. That meeting also proved unsuccessful, in part because not long afterwards Bartolomeu Dias returned to Portugal with news of his successful rounding of the southern tip of Africa near the Cape of Good Hope.

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. On 1 May , permission having been granted, Columbus presented his plans to Queen Isabella, who in turn referred it to a committee. The learned men of Spain, like their counterparts in Portugal, replied that Columbus had grossly underestimated the distance to Asia.

They pronounced the idea impractical and advised the Catholic Monarchs to pass on the proposed venture. To keep Columbus from taking his ideas elsewhere, and perhaps to keep their options open, the sovereigns gave him an allowance, totaling about 14, maravedis for the year, or about the annual salary of a sailor. Columbus also 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 A council led by Isabella's confessor, Hernando de Talavera , found Columbus's proposal to reach the Indies implausible.

Columbus had left for France when Ferdinand intervened, [ e ] first sending Talavera and Bishop Diego Deza to appeal to the queen. He would be entitled to one-tenth diezmo of all the revenues from the new lands in perpetuity. He also would have the option of buying one-eighth interest in any commercial venture in the new lands, and receive one-eighth ochavo of the profits.

In , during his third voyage to the Americas, Columbus was arrested and dismissed from his posts. He and his sons, Diego and Fernando, then conducted a lengthy series of court cases against the Castilian crown, known as the pleitos colombinos , alleging that the Crown had illegally reneged on its contractual obligations to Columbus and his heirs.

Diego resumed litigation in , which lasted until , and further disputes initiated by heirs continued until Between and , Columbus completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Americas , each voyage being sponsored by the Crown of Castile. On his first voyage he reached the Americas, initiating the European exploration and colonization of the continent , as well as the Columbian exchange.

His role in history is thus important to the Age of Discovery , Western history , and human history writ large. In Columbus's letter on the first voyage , published following his first return to Spain, he claimed that he had reached Asia, [ 97 ] as previously described by Marco Polo and other Europeans. Over his subsequent voyages, 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.

On the evening of 3 August , Columbus departed from Palos de la Frontera with three ships. On 7 October, the crew spotted "[i]mmense flocks of birds". At around the following morning, a lookout on the Pinta , Rodrigo de Triana , spotted land. I saw some who had marks of wounds on their bodies and I made signs to them asking what they were; and they showed me how people from other islands nearby came there and tried to take them, and how they defended themselves; and I believed and believe that they come here from tierra firme to take them captive.

They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak.

Columbus called the inhabitants of the lands that he visited Los Indios 'Indians'. I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern them as I pleased. Columbus also explored the northeast coast of Cuba, where he landed on 28 October. The wreck was used as a target for cannon fire to impress the native peoples. Columbus left 39 men, including the interpreter Luis de Torres , [ ] [ i ] and founded the settlement of La Navidad , in present-day Haiti.

Half of his crew went ashore to say prayers of thanksgiving in a chapel for having survived the storm. But while praying, they were imprisoned by the governor of the island, ostensibly on suspicion of being pirates. After a two-day stand-off, the prisoners were released, and Columbus again set sail for Spain. Another storm forced Columbus into the port at Lisbon.

After spending more than a week in Portugal, Columbus set sail for Spain. Returning to Palos on 15 March , he was given a hero's welcome and soon afterward received by Isabella and Ferdinand in Barcelona. Initially, Diego had been recognized for his intelligence and rapid acquisition of Spanish customs, and would serve as a guide and interpreter on each of Columbus's subsequent voyages.

By the second voyage's departure later in , Diego was the only Native out of the ten taken to Europe who had not died or become seriously ill as the result of disease; while on this voyage, he played a vital role in the discovery of La Navidad. He subsequently married and had a son, also named Diego, who died of illness in Following Columbus's death, Diego spent the rest of his life confined to Santo Domingo , and does not reappear in the historical record following a smallpox epidemic that swept Hispaniola in Columbus's letter on the first voyage , probably dispatched to the Spanish court upon arrival in Lisbon, was instrumental in spreading the news throughout Europe about his voyage.

Almost immediately after his arrival in Spain, printed versions began to appear, and word of his voyage spread rapidly. They were replaced by the Treaty of Tordesillas of He sailed with nearly 1, men, including sailors, soldiers, priests, carpenters, stonemasons, metalworkers, and farmers. On 3 November, they arrived in the Windward Islands ; the first island they encountered was named Dominica by Columbus, but not finding a good harbor there, they anchored off a nearby smaller island, which he named Mariagalante , now a part of Guadeloupe and called Marie-Galante.

Upon landing, Columbus christened the island San Juan Bautista after John the Baptist , and remained anchored there for two days from 20 to 21 November, filling the water casks of the ships in his fleet. On 22 November, Columbus returned to Hispaniola to visit La Navidad in modern-day Haiti , where 39 Spaniards had been left during the first voyage.

Columbus found the fort in ruins. Columbus then established a poorly located and short-lived settlement to the east, La Isabela , [ ] in the present-day Dominican Republic. A number of Spanish were killed in retaliation. By the time Columbus returned from exploring Cuba, the four primary leaders of the Arawak people in Hispaniola were gathering for war to try to drive the Spanish from the Island.

Columbus assembled a large number of troops, and joined with his one native ally, chief [Guacanagarix], met for battle. Columbus implemented encomienda , [ ] [ ] a Spanish labor system that rewarded conquerors with the labor of conquered non-Christian people. It is also recorded that punishments to both Spaniards and natives included whippings and mutilation cutting noses and ears.

Columbus and the colonists enslaved many of the indigenous people, [ ] including children. In February , Columbus rounded up about 1, Arawaks, some of whom had rebelled, in a great slave raid. About of the strongest were shipped to Spain as slaves, [ ] with about two hundred of those dying en route. In June , the Spanish crown sent ships and supplies to Hispaniola.

He renewed his effort to get supplies to Columbus, and was working to organize a fleet when he suddenly died in December. On 8 June the crew sighted land somewhere between Lisbon and Cape St. 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 Columbus, sailing south to the Cape Verde Islands and then westward across the Atlantic.

It is probable that this expedition was intended at least partly to confirm rumors of a large continent south of the Caribbean Sea, that is, South America. On 31 July they sighted Trinidad , [ ] the most southerly of the Caribbean islands. On 5 August, Columbus sent several small boats ashore on the southern side of the Paria Peninsula in what is now Venezuela, [ ] [ ] near the mouth of the Orinoco river.

On 19 August, Columbus returned to Hispaniola. There he found settlers in rebellion against his rule, and his unfulfilled promises of riches. Columbus had some of the Europeans tried for their disobedience; at least one rebel leader was hanged. In October , Columbus sent two ships to Spain, asking the Court of Spain to appoint a royal commissioner to help him govern.

The sovereigns sent Francisco de Bobadilla , a relative of Marquesa Beatriz de Bobadilla , a patron of Columbus and a close friend of Queen Isabella, [ ] [ ] to investigate the accusations of brutality made against the Admiral. Arriving in Santo Domingo while Columbus was away, Bobadilla was immediately met with complaints about all three Columbus brothers.

Bobadilla reported to Spain that Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery. He claimed that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola. In early October , Columbus and Diego presented themselves to Bobadilla, and were put in chains aboard La Gorda , the caravel on which Bobadilla had arrived at Santo Domingo.

Not long after, the king and queen summoned the Columbus brothers to the Alhambra palace in Granada. The sovereigns expressed indignation at the actions of Bobadilla, who was then recalled and ordered to make restitutions of the property he had confiscated from Columbus. New light was shed on the seizure of Columbus and his brother Bartholomew, the Adelantado , with the discovery by archivist Isabel Aguirre of an incomplete copy of the testimonies against them gathered by Francisco de Bobadilla at Santo Domingo in The ships were crewed by men, including his brother Bartholomew as second in command and his son Fernando.

The siege had been lifted by the time they arrived, so the Spaniards stayed only a day and continued on to the Canary Islands. On 15 June, the fleet arrived at Martinique , where it lingered for several days. A hurricane was forming, so Columbus continued westward, [ ] hoping to find shelter on Hispaniola. He arrived at Santo Domingo on 29 June, but was denied port, and the new governor Francisco de Bobadilla refused to listen to his warning that a hurricane was approaching.

Instead, while Columbus's ships sheltered at the mouth of the Rio Jaina, the first Spanish treasure fleet sailed into the hurricane. Columbus's ships survived with only minor damage, while 20 of the 30 ships in the governor's fleet were lost along with lives including that of Francisco de Bobadilla. Although a few surviving ships managed to straggle back to Santo Domingo, Aguja , the fragile ship carrying Columbus's personal belongings and his 4, pesos in gold was the sole vessel to reach Spain.

Here Bartholomew found native merchants and a large canoe. Sailing south along the Nicaraguan coast, he found a channel that led into Almirante Bay in Panama on 5 October. Columbus left for Hispaniola on 16 April. On 10 May he sighted the Cayman Islands , naming them Las Tortugas after the numerous sea turtles there. For six months Columbus and of his men remained stranded on Jamaica.

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. In his later years, Columbus demanded that the Crown of Castile give him his tenth of all the riches and trade goods yielded by the new lands, as stipulated in the Capitulations of Santa Fe.

After his death, his heirs sued the Crown for a part of the profits from trade with America, as well as other rewards. This led to a protracted series of legal disputes known as the pleitos colombinos 'Columbian lawsuits'. During a violent storm on his first return voyage, Columbus, then 41, had suffered an attack of what was believed at the time to be gout.

In subsequent years, he was plagued with what was thought to be influenza and other fevers, bleeding from the eyes, temporary blindness and prolonged attacks of gout. The attacks increased in duration and severity, sometimes leaving Columbus bedridden for months at a time, and culminated in his death 14 years later. Based on Columbus's lifestyle and the described symptoms, some modern commentators suspect that he suffered from reactive arthritis , rather than gout.

In , 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 converted Jew family.

Some historians such as H. He stubbornly continued to make pleas to the Crown to defend his own personal privileges and his family's. Columbus's remains were first buried at the Chapel of Wonders at the Convent of St. Francis, Valladolid , [ ] but were then moved to the monastery of La Cartuja in Seville southern Spain by the will of his son Diego.

In about , the remains of both Columbus and his son Diego were moved to a cathedral in Colonial Santo Domingo , in the present-day Dominican Republic ; Columbus had requested to be buried on the island. These matched corresponding DNA from Columbus's brother, supporting that the two men had the same mother. Inscriptions found the next year read "Last of the remains of the first admiral, Sire Christopher Columbus, discoverer.

Assistant Secretary of State John Eugene Osborne , who suggested in that they travel through the Panama Canal as a part of its opening ceremony. The authorities in Santo Domingo have never allowed these remains to be DNA-tested, so it is unconfirmed whether they are from Columbus's body as well. The figure of Columbus was not ignored in the British colonies during the colonial era: 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".

The use of Columbus as a founding figure of New World nations spread rapidly after the American Revolution. This was out of a desire to develop a national history and founding myth with fewer ties to Britain. 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.

To commemorate the th anniversary of the landing of Columbus, [ ] the World's Fair in Chicago was named the World's Columbian Exposition. Postal Service issued the first U. The policies related to the celebration of the Spanish colonial empire as the vehicle of a nationalist project undertaken in Spain during the Restoration in the late 19th century took form with the commemoration of the 4th centenary on 12 October in which the figure of Columbus was extolled by the Conservative government , eventually becoming the very same national day.

For the Columbus Quincentenary in , a second Columbian issue was released jointly with Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The Boal Mansion Museum, founded in , contains a collection of materials concerning later descendants of Columbus and collateral branches of the family. The chapel interior was dismantled and moved from Spain in and re-erected on the Boal estate at Boalsburg , Pennsylvania.

Inside it are numerous religious paintings and other objects including a reliquary with fragments of wood supposedly from the True Cross. The museum also holds a collection of documents mostly relating to Columbus descendants of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In many countries of the Americas, as well as Spain and Italy, Columbus Day celebrates the anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas on 12 October The voyages of Columbus are considered a turning point in human history, [ ] marking the beginning of globalization and accompanying demographic, commercial, economic, social, and political changes.

His 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. In the first century after his endeavors, Columbus's figure largely languished in the backwaters of history, and his reputation was beset by his failures as a colonial administrator.

His 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. 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.

The Americanization of the figure of 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. This representation of Columbus's triumph and the Native's recoil is a demonstration of supposed white superiority over savage, naive Natives.

Capitol building where it remained until its removal in the midth century, the sculpture reflected the contemporary view of whites in the U. President James Buchanan , who proposed the sculpture, described it as representing "the great discoverer when he first bounded with ecstasy upon the shore, ail his toils past, presenting a hemisphere to the astonished world, with the name America inscribed upon it.

Whilst he is thus standing upon the shore, a female savage, with awe and wonder depicted in her countenance, is gazing upon him. The American 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 Columbus as a sort of ethnic founding father.

From the s onward, a narrative of Columbus being responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples and environmental destruction began to compete with the then predominant discourse of Columbus as Christ-bearer, scientist, or father of America. Though Christopher Columbus came to be considered the European discoverer of America in Western popular culture, his historical legacy is more nuanced.

In the 19th century, amid a revival of interest in Norse culture , Carl Christian Rafn and Benjamin Franklin DeCosta wrote works establishing that the Norse had preceded Columbus in colonizing the Americas. Europeans devised explanations for the origins of the Native Americans and their geographical distribution with narratives that often served to reinforce their own preconceptions built on ancient intellectual foundations.

O'Gorman argues that to assert Columbus "discovered America" is to shape the facts concerning the events of to make them conform to an interpretation that arose many years later. He suggests that the word "encounter" is more appropriate, being a more universal term which includes Native Americans in the narrative. Historians have traditionally argued that Columbus remained convinced until his death that his journeys had been along the east coast of Asia as he originally intended [ ] [ ] excluding arguments such as Anderson's.

Washington Irving's biography of Columbus popularized the idea that 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. As such it contains no sign of the Americas and yet demonstrates the common belief in a spherical Earth.

He accounted for the shift by concluding that Earth's figure is pear-shaped , with the 'stalk' portion comparing this to a woman's breast being nearest Heaven and upon which was centered the Earthly Paradise. 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.

According to scholars of Native American history, George Tinker and Mark Freedman, Columbus was responsible for creating a cycle of "murder, violence, and slavery" to maximize exploitation of the Caribbean islands' resources, and that Native deaths on the scale at which they occurred would not have been caused by new diseases alone.

Aude ambroggi biography of christopher columbus

Further, they describe the proposition that disease and not genocide caused these deaths as "American holocaust denial ". As a result of the protests and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd in , many public monuments of Christopher Columbus have been removed. Some historians have criticized Columbus for initiating the widespread colonization of the Americas and for abusing its native population.

Croix , Columbus's friend Michele da Cuneo—according to his own account—kept an indigenous woman he captured, whom Columbus "gave to [him]", then brutally raped her. For example, a study of Spanish archival sources showed that the cascabela quotas were imposed by Guarionex , not Columbus, and that there is no mention, in the primary sources, of punishment by cutting off hands for failing to pay.

Even those who loved him had to admit the atrocities that had taken place. According to historian Emily Berquist Soule, the immense Portuguese profits from the maritime trade in African slaves along the West African coast served as an inspiration for Columbus to create a counterpart of this apparatus in the New World using indigenous American slaves.

Connell has argued that while Columbus "brought the entrepreneurial form of slavery to the New World", this "was a phenomenon of the times", further arguing that "we have to be very careful about applying 20th-century understandings of morality to the morality of the 15th century. Around the turn of the 21st century, estimates for the pre-Columbian population of Hispaniola ranged between , and two million, [ ] [ ] [ ] [ t ] but genetic analysis published in late suggests that smaller figures are more likely, perhaps as low as 10,—50, for Hispaniola and Puerto Rico combined.

Mann writes that "It was as if the suffering these diseases had caused in Eurasia over the past millennia were concentrated into the span of decades. According to Noble David Cook, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact. There is also evidence that they had poor diets and were overworked.

The diseases that devastated the Native Americans came in multiple waves at different times, sometimes as much as centuries apart, which would mean that survivors of one disease may have been killed by others, preventing the population from recovering. Biographers and historians have a wide range of opinions about Columbus's expertise and experience navigating and captaining ships.

One scholar lists some European works ranging from the s to s that support Columbus's experience and skill as among the best in Genoa, while listing some American works over a similar timeframe that portray the explorer as an untrained entrepreneur, having only minor crew or passenger experience prior to his noted journeys. The word rubios can mean "blond", "fair", or "ruddy".

A well-known image of Columbus is a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo , which has been reproduced in many textbooks. It agrees with descriptions of Columbus in that it shows a large man with auburn hair, but the painting dates from so cannot have been painted from life. Furthermore, the inscription identifying the subject as Columbus was probably added later, and the face shown differs from that of other images.

At the World's Columbian Exposition in , 71 alleged portraits of Columbus were displayed; most of them did not match contemporary descriptions. While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire.

She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. Yet, whilst he was pious in some regards, he also shared the view, common at the time, that European Christians had a moral superiority due to their following the one true faith. Although Columbus held back some of the worst excesses of his sailors, he took back human slaves and looted property from the indigenous people.

As part of the deal, the Spanish monarchy appointed Columbus Viceroy and Governor of the Indies in the island of Hispaniola. He also delegated the governorship to his brothers. However, in , on the orders of the Spanish monarchy, Columbus was arrested and placed in chains. There were allegations of incompetence, misrule and barbaric practices in the governorship of the new colonies.

After several weeks in jail, Columbus and his brothers were released, but Columbus was not allowed to be governor of Hispaniola anymore. Towards the end of his life, Columbus became increasingly religious. He was also frustrated with his lack of public recognition and seeming demotion in the eyes of the Spanish monarchs. In , he wrote a letter to the monarchs laying out his sense of unappreciated sacrifice.

Columbus landed on a number of other islands in the Caribbean, including Cuba and Hispaniola, and returned to Spain in triumph. He was made 'admiral of the Seven Seas' and viceroy of the Indies, and within a few months, set off on a second and larger voyage. More territory was covered, but the Asian lands that Columbus was aiming for remained elusive.

Indeed, others began to dispute whether this was in fact the Orient or a completely 'new' world. Columbus made two further voyages to the newfound territories, but suffered defeat and humiliation along the way. A great navigator, Columbus was less successful as an administrator and was accused of mismanagement.