On 12 October 1492 the sailor Rodrigo de Trina shouted: Tierra! But for the landing in the “New World”, he waited for dawn. To Christopher Columbus, and him alone, we owe the discovery, and the subsequent conquest, of the American continent, an event that shook the world.
Leaving Palos on August 3, 1492, with three caravels (Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria) Columbus thought he was heading towards the Indias. Christopher Columbus sailed for 33 days, before landing on a new continent, which later took the name America in honour of another great Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci. The explorer did not touch the continental part, but an island on the continent of today's Central America which he christened San Salvador.
The character Christopher Columbus, historically decipherable only when he moved from his native Genoa to the most promising Portuguese shores, remains one of the most fascinating in history. Nothing, or almost nothing, is known about him as a young man, and not even a portrait has remained in which it is possible to catch at least the expression of that singular man. His bibliography tells us that Christopher Columbus was born and raised in Genoa, he was well-off, and his father, who had always been a Catholic by profession, had misadventures, and so he moved to Savona. The Europe where Columbus lived was a Europe where the Genoese dominated the Mediterranean when the Muslim conquest, first of all Turkish, and then of the Ways of the Indies, made it difficult to supply the voluptuous goods to which Europeans had become accustomed: pearls, silks, spices, gold. The Venetians did not understand that the closure of those markets was irreversible. The Genoese sensed that the West was the future of European trade. When Columbus left Genoa, he found first in Portugal, and then in Spain the financing that helped him to realise his plan: to sail west to reach the Indias. At the end of the 15th century, they knew that the world was spherical and Columbus studied the routes of his navigation on the maps of his brother Bartholomew (well-known cartographer). Welcomed with all honours on his return to Spain, Columbus made three more journeys to the Americas, still under the crown of Ferdinand the Second of Aragon and Isabella of Castile: financiers of his enterprises.
By Kork75!
