Christopher Columbus

Italian explorer who opened the Americas to European colonization

His expeditions initiated widespread European exploration and colonization of the Americas.^[1] The Columbian exchange of plants, animals, diseases, and ideas followed his first voyage.^[1]

Quick Facts

Order: 1st
Office: Governor of the Indies
Took office: 1492
Left office: 1499
Appointer: Isabella I of Castile
Successor: Francisco de Bobadilla
Born: Between 25 August and 31 October 1451
Birthplace: Genoa, Republic of Genoa

Facts from the source article.

Life and work

Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa between 25 August and 31 October 1451, the son of wool weaver Domenico Colombo and Susanna Fontanarossa.^[2][3] Columbus learned Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian, and read widely in astronomy, geography, and history.^[4] Columbus completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Americas, exploring much of the Caribbean and part of the northern coast of South America.^[5][6] Columbus wrote that his seafaring began at 14; his travels took him north to the British and Irish Isles and south to modern-day Ghana.^[7][8]

Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, a Portuguese noblewoman, became Columbus's wife and mother of his son Diego; later, Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, a Castilian mistress, bore him a second son named Ferdinand.^[7] King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain finally agreed in 1492 to finance Columbus's Atlantic crossing.^[9][10]

What the cited sources add

Morgan states that Columbus assumed the strange plants he saw were unfamiliar only because he had not read enough about them.^[6] The same report notes that Columbus may have gone to Iceland before his famous voyage.^[11] Morgan writes that Columbus gave orders to capture natives, treat them well, and make them lose their fear so that gain might be made.^[6] Morgan also states that the Arawak Indians of Española were the handsomest people Columbus encountered in the New World.^[6]

References

Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Dowlah, "Cross-Border Labor Mobility: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives", Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; Mills, Keneth and Taylor, William B., Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History, p. 36, SR Books, 1998, (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Edwards, "Ferdinand and Isabella", Routledge, 2014, p. 118 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Phillips Phillips 1992, p. 126; "Columbus, Diego (brother)"; Bergreen 2011, p. 56; King, "The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance", Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021, p. 264 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Morgan, "Columbus' Confusion About the New World", October 2009 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Specht, "The Columbian Exchange", CRC Press, 2017, p. 23 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Morgan, "Columbus' Confusion About the New World", October 2009. facts only, no text reused. smithsonianmag.com
Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Fernández-Armesto, "Columbus on Himself", Hackett, 2010, p. 270; Taviani, "The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia", Springer, 2016, p. 24–25; Phillips Phillips 1992, p. 126 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Phillips Phillips 1992, p. 126 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Muzio, "The Tragedy of Human Development: A Genealogy of Capital as Power", Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, p. 58; Echevarría, "The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature", Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 63; Johanyak, "The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia", Springer, 2010, p. 136; King, "Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue", Yale University Press, 2013 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Christopher Columbus" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Lantigua, "Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought", Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 53 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Abrams, "La Salle Professor Says Columbus Almost Died Years Before His New World Trip", CBS News, October 13, 2014. facts only, no text reused. cbsnews.com

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Christopher Columbus (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.