REDISCOVERING COLUMBUS: by Peter Stanford Columbus was born into a world in fennent. To that world, as tir with the potent mix of old learning rediscovered and the pull of new horizons, he brought an astonishingly clear and constant sense of mi ss ion . A devoted student of hi s life and voyages, Robert Fuson, says: "Columbus had one foot in the medieval world and one in the modern ." It was that step forward into the modern world that we remember-but he was not what we would call an innovator. He excelled in the traditional arts of navigation , but had only a fumbling grasp of the dawning science of celestial navigation . Hi s great biographer, the late Samuel Eliot Morison (1887-1976) , who sailed in hi s wake literally , and in other ways too, considered him the greatest of dead-reckoning nav igators, with a gift for finding hi s way over vast distances with uncanny accuracy-a product, perhaps, of hi s total immersion in hi s subject and overpowering ly strong will to get where he was headed. Hi s world picture, distorted by hi s drive to find a short, direct westward route to China and the Indies, as Mori son emphasizes, was less advanced than that of the savants who repeatedly recommended against sponsoring his voyage. The savants' measurements were right. Columbus was wrong. But they weren't the ones to change the world; he was. A City by the Sea If Columbus changed his world, he was very much of that world . Born Cristofaro Colombo in "Genova la Superba," (Genoa, the " noble and powerful city by the sea," as he was to remember it in his will), he was at the epicenter of the burgeoning maritime trades that were quickening European life aro und the Med iterranean. And the Med iterranean powers were reaching out into the Ocean Sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules to the westward . When he was born , in 1451, Genoa, at the head of the Italian peninsula on the western side, had been overtaken (but not eliminated) by Venice, " la Serenissima," in the struggle for dominance in the rich trade with the eastern Mediterranean shores which brought Oriental si lks, porcelains and spices to the Western world through Arab inte rmediaries. Venice, at the head of the Adriatic, looked east and south to Egypt and the Levant, and aro und the corner into Constantinople and the fading g lories of 16
the Byzantine Empire, which finally fell to the invading Ottoman Turks in 1453 , when Columbus was a sma ll child . Constantinople-the last s urvival of the old Roman Empire, hav ing outlived its parent by a thou sand years- had been weakened by the aggressive sea power of Venice, which for the last few centu -
ChristopherColumbus, 145 1-506. Described by his son Ferdinand as tall, well built , with a Jong face , aquiline nose and a fair complexion , the Discoverer seems fa irly presented in this portrait painted to the order of a bishop collecting a portrait ga llery of men of achievement, a generation after his death (Museo Giorio, Como, Italy). This is the face of a dreamer, surely, backed by a stubborn certitude of his mission in the world.
ries had been biting chunks out of the seaborne co mmerce th at bound the Byzantine Empire together. Ultimately that rich commerce ended up in the hands of Venice and to a lesser ex tent Genoa- the Genoese having been called in by the Byzantines to offset the domi nance of Venice, after Venice had used the pretex t of a crusade to actually sack Constantinople in 1204. Following the fall of Constantinople, Venice and Genoa continued to dominate Mediterranean trade, dealing with all comers and mastering the seaways while the Arab kingdoms ruled the southern and eastern shores, and the Turks stormed on into the Balkans. This sea mastery by the Italian city states proved to be a critical fac tor in comi ng developments . Of great importance, also, was the outward-looking attitude of these seaport c ities. In the late 1200s, 200 years before Columbus set sa il on hi s voyage of discovery , Marco Polo of Venice had trave lled overland to C hina. There he entered the service of the Great Khan,
trave lling widely in hi s realms. The tales of wonder he brought back from thi s adv anced civili zation stirred new interest in establishing directcontact with the Far East, whose prec iou s wares had been handled by various midd lemen in the Eastern Med iterranean for nea rly two thousand years. He brought reports also of Cipangu , the semi -mythical kingdom of Japan , which Genghis Khan never managed to conquer-so Marco never visited it. Its wealth lost nothing in the telling by thi s fact, and somehow he placed it 1500 mil es offshore. After the land route to China that Marco had followed was shut down following the collapse of the Mongo l Empire and the ri se of the more intransi gent Turkish caliphates, it was natura l for a few people to wonder about an alternate route to the Far East. Meanwhile, the Mediterranean sea trades pushed to the westward. Italian bankers and adventurers crowded into the great Atlantic port of Li sbon , an international seaport that had served as a way stati on for the crusaders , who also helped the Portuguese liberate their country from the Moors from Africa. Itali an navi gators helped the young kingdom settle the Atlantic islands, from the Azores to the Cape Verdes. Here Genoa led, and in the 1290s (the same era that Venice's Marco Polo was in China) the Genoese opened regular packet serv ice to Southampton and Antwerp, in a ne w breed of seago ing galleys that could keep the sea in the open-water passage across the stormy Bay of Biscay and on into the English Chan1~el. In the sa me decade, the Vi valdi s, fa ther and son, set sail from Genoa to push down the coast of Africa, seeking a sea-route to the Indies. The haunting lore of the Polo journey (a story dictated by the Venetian Marco in a Genoese prison , incidentally , following one of the battles between the two cities) had worked its way into the European consc iousness for a good century and a half, by the time Columbus came into awareness ofit. The wool trade with England and Flanders had become an establi shed fact of commerc ial life. Columbus's father, Domenico, was apprenticed to a Flemish clothier who had settled in Genoa. Domenico took up this trade and added sidelines, being a wine merchant and innkeeperin a somewhat feckless manner, Samuel Eliot Morison suggests. But he had, ev idently, a persuas ive way about him and SEA HISTORY 53, SPRING 1990