Christopher Columbus and the Rise of the Spanish Empire

Christopher Columbus was born in Italy. He was the son of Domenico Colombo and Suzanna Fontanarossa. With one sister and four brothers, Christopher was the oldest. He grew up along a seaport of west Genoa. He helped his father in the family business of processing and selling wool. Having grown up in a major seaport, as most young men who did, a seafaring career only came natural for him. By 14, he was serving as messenger, common sailor, and even a privateer as he proved himself to be a confident sailor. By 21 he had command of a ship on expedition to North Africa. By 23, he was hired as a sailor on his first long journey to the island of Khios, in the Aegean Sea. By 25, he was given the opportunity to sail into the Atlantic Ocean. This proved disasterous in that the fleet was attacked by French privateers off the tip of Portugal. Columbus’s ship was burned. His only escape was to swim 6 miles to the Portuguese coast. He eventually settled in Lisbon, Portugal, a large Genoese community of merchants and shipbuilders. He married into Portuguese nobility, the daughter of former Govenor of Porto Santo, a Portuguese possession off the northwest coast of Africa, in the Madeira Islands. Felipa Perestrello e Moniz, relatively poor but highly respected, gave Columbus a son Diego and died soon after.

After presenting his proposal of sailing east by going west, to King John II of Portugal, Christopher Columbus with his son moved to Spain when his proposal was denied. Not only was the adventure too expensive, Columbus was wrong about distances and measurements, and his plan contradicted the king’s commitment to finding an eastward route to Asia by traveling around Africa. Columbus’s idea to get to the east by sailing west was based upon geographers well established theory that there was only one body of water on the surface of the earth and that it connected Europe and Asia. Based on this, one could sail from the west to get to the east. Only the distance was in question.

It took ten years for Spain to decide to fund Columbus’s exploration only after Portugal had grown internationally. Portuguese explorers had discovered and settled Madeiras and Azores, occupied the Cape Verde Islands and had established trading posts in the Gulf of Guinea. And, by 1488, Bartolomeu Dias, Portuguese navigator had fulfilled his King John II’s commitment by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa opening a sea route to the Far East. Spain felt compelled to rise to Portugal’s international growth and eventually sponsored Columbus’s travel.