Petri liukkonen biography of christopher columbus

Christopher Columbus, while primarily known for his voyages, did not amass significant wealth from his explorations during his lifetime. After his initial journey in , Columbus was rewarded by the Spanish Crown with titles and a share of any riches discovered in the lands he explored. His rewards included the governorship of the newly found territories and the right to collect a percentage of any gold, spices, or profits generated.

However, the financial returns from these endeavors were often less than expected, primarily due to poor mismanagement and declining relations with indigenous populations. Throughout his four voyages, Columbus struggled to balance the expectations of the Spanish monarchy against the actual resources acquired. His estimates of the wealth he would find were vastly overstated, leading to dissatisfaction among his investors and the Crown.

By the end of his life, Columbus faced financial ruin as much of his promised gold and treasures never materialized. He lived off his modest earnings as he fought to restore his reputation, ultimately dying in relative obscurity and not as a wealthy man despite his monumental impact on world history. We assure our audience that we will remove any contents that are not accurate or according to formal reports and queries if they are justified.

We commit to cover sensible issues responsibly through the principles of neutrality. To report about any issues in our articles, please feel free to Contact Us. Our dedicated Editorial team verifies each of the articles published on the Biographyhost. Biography Host. Christopher Columbus Biography. Italian Explorer and Navigator Christopher Columbus Biography Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer who made historical voyages across the Atlantic, mistakenly discovering the Americas in Columbus Search of Asia Filipa Perestrelo.

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.

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. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Italian navigator and explorer — For other uses, see Christopher Columbus disambiguation and Cristoforo Colombo disambiguation. Posthumous portrait of a man, said to be Christopher Columbus, by Sebastiano del Piombo , [ a ].

Filipa Moniz Perestrelo. Diego Ferdinand Diego adopted Lucayan. Domenico Colombo father Susanna Fontanarossa mother. Further information: Origin theories of Christopher Columbus. Geographical considerations. Quest for financial support for a voyage. Agreement with the Spanish crown. Main article: Voyages of Christopher Columbus. First voyage — Second voyage — Third voyage — Fourth voyage — Main article: Fourth voyage of Columbus.

Later life, illness, and death. Tomb in Seville Cathedral. The remains in the casket are borne by kings of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Navarre. Further information: List of places named for Christopher Columbus and List of monuments and memorials to Christopher Columbus. Originality of discovery of America. America as a distinct land. Further information: Myth of the flat Earth.

See also: Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas. Vespucci seems to have modeled his naming of the "new world" after Columbus's description of this discovery. It contained an account of Columbus's seven-year reign as the first governor of the Indies. Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian, states: "Even those who loved him [Columbus] had to admit the atrocities that had taken place.

Two tiny portions of dust from the same source were placed in separate vials. Most modern historians reject his figures. January Visual Anthropology. ISSN Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. ISBN Retrieved 2 January Columbus on Himself. She was of peasant parentage, but, when Columbus met her, was the ward of a well-to-do relative in Cordoba.

A meat business gave her income of her own, mentioned in the only other record of Columbus's solicitude for her: a letter to Diego, written in , just before departure on the fourth Atlantic crossing, in which the explorer enjoins his son to 'take Beatriz Enriquez in your care for love of me, as you your own mother'. In Bedini, Silvio A.

The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia. Columbus never married Beatriz. When he returned from the first voyage, he was given the greatest of honors and elevated to the highest position in Spain. Because of his discovery, he became one of the most illustrious persons at the Spanish court and had to submit, like all the great persons of the time, to customary legal restrictions on matters of marriage and extramarital relations.

The Alphonsine laws forbade extramarital relations of concubinage for "illustrious people" king, princes, dukes, counts, marquis with plebeian women, if they themselves were or their forefathers had been of inferior social condition. Palgrave Macmillan. Genoa: Sagep Editrice.

Petri liukkonen biography of christopher columbus

Genova: Grafiche Frassicomo. Archived PDF from the original on 9 October Ferdinand and Isabella. New International Encyclopedia 1st ed. New York: Dodd, Mead. All retrieved 3 February Atlantic Monthly Press. Univ of Nebraska Press. Bedini, Silvio A. Retrieved 21 November In McGovern, James R. The World of Columbus. Mercer University Press.

It is most probable that Columbus visited Bristol, where he was introduced to English commerce with Iceland. Sture In Ureland, P. Sture; Clarkson, Iain eds. Walter de Gruyter. Ireland Revisited. Johns Hopkins University Press. Some writers have suggested that it was during this visit to Iceland that Columbus heard of land in the west.

Keeping the source of his information secret, they say, he concocted a plan to sail westward. Certainly the knowledge was generally available without attending any saga-telling parties. That this knowledge reached Columbus seems unlikely, however, for later, when trying to get backing for his project, he went to great lengths to unearth even the slightest scraps of information that would add to the plausibility of his scheme.

Knowledge of the Norse explorations could have helped. Columbus, America, and the World. Council on National Literatures. Many Columbists Duke University Press. The William and Mary Quarterly. JSTOR Oxford University Press. October Smithsonian Magazine. The Christian Century in Japan, — University of California Press. Cambridge University Press.

Yale University Press. Iberian Asia: the strategies of Spanish and Portuguese empire building, — Thesis. OCLC ProQuest Comparative Studies in Society and History. Cambridge University Press : — S2CID Archived from the original PDF on 26 February Journal of the American Oriental Society. Institute of Navigation. Archived from the original on 29 October Retrieved 5 July International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

Bibcode : IJNAr.. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Universe. New York: Watson-Guptill. New York: Random House. Retrieved 20 February New York: Abrams Books. Imago Mundi. Jahangirnagar University: Retrieved 9 January IEEE Spectrum. Constructed on a framework of latitude and longitude, the Ptolemy-revival map projections revealed the extent of the known world in relation to the whole.

The Atlantic. JHU Press. Renaissance Europe 2nd ed. Lexington, Massachusetts: D. Heath and Company. MIT Press. It is also known that wind patterns and water currents in the Atlantic were crucial factors for launching an outward passage from the Canaries: Columbus understood that his chance of crossing the ocean was significantly greater just beyond the Canary calms, where he expected to catch the northeastern trade winds—although, as some authors have pointed out, "westing" from the Canaries, instead of dipping farther south, was hardly an optimal sailing choice, since Columbus's fleet was bound to lose, as soon it did, the northeasterlies in the mid-Atlantic.

Frederick Mathematics Magazine. ISSN X. Again it was rejected. In historical hindsight this looks like a fatally missed opportunity for the Portuguese crown, but the king had good reason not to accept Columbus's project. His panel of experts cast grave doubts on the assumptions behind it, noting that Columbus had underestimated the distance to China.

Chapter XIII, p. Archived from the original on 16 October Retrieved 24 May The Capitulaciones de Santa Fe appointed Columbus as the official viceroy of the Crown, which entitled him, by virtue of royal concession, to all the honors and jurisdictions accorded the conquerors of the Canaries. Usage of the terms "to discover" descubrir and "to acquire" ganar were legal cues indicating the goals of Spanish possession through occupancy and conquest.

Madrid: Ferdinand Columbus: Renaissance Collector — British Museum Press. The Columbian Exchange. CRC Press. In Horodowich, Elizabeth; Markey, Lia eds. Retrieved 10 April August Retrieved 16 March Archived from the original on 26 May Retrieved 12 October When he was still a teenager, he got a job on a merchant ship. He remained at sea until , when pirates attacked his ship as it sailed north along the Portuguese coast.

The boat sank, but the young Columbus floated to shore on a scrap of wood and made his way to Lisbon, where he eventually studied mathematics, astronomy, cartography and navigation. He also began to hatch the plan that would change the world forever. How and when did humans first set foot in North America? Here are three theories. At the end of the 15th century, it was nearly impossible to reach Asia from Europe by land.

The route was long and arduous, and encounters with hostile armies were difficult to avoid. Portuguese explorers solved this problem by taking to the sea: They sailed south along the West African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope. But Columbus had a different idea: Why not sail west across the Atlantic instead of around the massive African continent?

He argued incorrectly that the circumference of the Earth was much smaller than his contemporaries believed it was; accordingly, he believed that the journey by boat from Europe to Asia should be not only possible, but comparatively easy via an as-yet undiscovered Northwest Passage. He presented his plan to officials in Portugal and England, but it was not until that he found a sympathetic audience: the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

Columbus wanted fame and fortune. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the same, along with the opportunity to export Catholicism to lands across the globe. Columbus, a devout Catholic, was equally enthusiastic about this possibility. There they established a colony named Vineland meaning fertile region […]. Leif Eriksson Day commemorates the Norse explorer believed to have led the first European expedition to North America.

On October 12, the ships made landfall—not in the East Indies, as Columbus assumed, but on one of the Bahamian islands, likely San Salvador. He is believed to have been the son of Dominico Colombo and Susanna Fontanarossa and had four siblings: brothers Bartholomew, Giovanni, and Giacomo, and a sister named Bianchinetta. In his 20s, Columbus moved to Lisbon, Portugal, and later resettled in Spain, which remained his home base for the duration of his life.

Columbus first went to sea as a teenager, participating in several trading voyages in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. One such voyage, to the island of Khios, in modern-day Greece, brought him the closest he would ever come to Asia. His first voyage into the Atlantic Ocean in nearly cost him his life, as the commercial fleet he was sailing with was attacked by French privateers off the coast of Portugal.

His ship was burned, and Columbus had to swim to the Portuguese shore. He made his way to Lisbon, where he eventually settled and married Filipa Perestrelo. The couple had one son, Diego, around His wife died when Diego was a young boy, and Columbus moved to Spain. He had a second son, Fernando, who was born out of wedlock in with Beatriz Enriquez de Arana.

After participating in several other expeditions to Africa, Columbus learned about the Atlantic currents that flow east and west from the Canary Islands. The Asian islands near China and India were fabled for their spices and gold, making them an attractive destination for Europeans—but Muslim domination of the trade routes through the Middle East made travel eastward difficult.

Columbus devised a route to sail west across the Atlantic to reach Asia, believing it would be quicker and safer. He estimated the earth to be a sphere and the distance between the Canary Islands and Japan to be about 2, miles. Despite their disagreement with Columbus on matters of distance, they concurred that a westward voyage from Europe would be an uninterrupted water route.

Columbus proposed a three-ship voyage of discovery across the Atlantic first to the Portuguese king, then to Genoa, and finally to Venice. He was rejected each time. Their focus was on a war with the Muslims, and their nautical experts were skeptical, so they initially rejected Columbus. The idea, however, must have intrigued the monarchs, because they kept Columbus on a retainer.

Columbus continued to lobby the royal court, and soon, the Spanish army captured the last Muslim stronghold in Granada in January Shortly thereafter, the monarchs agreed to finance his expedition. On October 12, , after 36 days of sailing westward across the Atlantic, Columbus and several crewmen set foot on an island in present-day Bahamas, claiming it for Spain.

There, his crew encountered a timid but friendly group of natives who were open to trade with the sailors.