Laeticia boudou biography of christopher columbus

He also delegated the governorship to his brothers. However, in , on the orders of the Spanish monarchy, Columbus was arrested and placed in chains. There were allegations of incompetence, misrule and barbaric practices in the governorship of the new colonies. After several weeks in jail, Columbus and his brothers were released, but Columbus was not allowed to be governor of Hispaniola anymore.

Towards the end of his life, Columbus became increasingly religious. He was also frustrated with his lack of public recognition and seeming demotion in the eyes of the Spanish monarchs. In , he wrote a letter to the monarchs laying out his sense of unappreciated sacrifice. All that was left to me and my brothers has been taken away and sold, even to the cloak that I wore, without hearing or trial, to my great dishonor.

Columbus died in , aged 54 from a heart attack related to reactive arthritis. Towards the end of his life, he was frequently in physical pain from his journeys. From the s onward, a narrative of Columbus being responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples and environmental destruction began to compete with the then predominant discourse of Columbus as Christ-bearer, scientist, or father of America.

Though Christopher Columbus came to be considered the European discoverer of America in Western popular culture, his historical legacy is more nuanced. In the 19th century, amid a revival of interest in Norse culture , Carl Christian Rafn and Benjamin Franklin DeCosta wrote works establishing that the Norse had preceded Columbus in colonizing the Americas.

Europeans devised explanations for the origins of the Native Americans and their geographical distribution with narratives that often served to reinforce their own preconceptions built on ancient intellectual foundations. O'Gorman argues that to assert Columbus "discovered America" is to shape the facts concerning the events of to make them conform to an interpretation that arose many years later.

He suggests that the word "encounter" is more appropriate, being a more universal term which includes Native Americans in the narrative. Historians have traditionally argued that Columbus remained convinced until his death that his journeys had been along the east coast of Asia as he originally intended [ ] [ ] excluding arguments such as Anderson's.

Washington Irving's biography of Columbus popularized the idea that Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because many Catholic theologians insisted that the Earth was flat , [ ] but this is a popular misconception which can be traced back to 17th-century Protestants campaigning against Catholicism. As such it contains no sign of the Americas and yet demonstrates the common belief in a spherical Earth.

He accounted for the shift by concluding that Earth's figure is pear-shaped , with the 'stalk' portion comparing this to a woman's breast being nearest Heaven and upon which was centered the Earthly Paradise. Columbus has been criticized both for his brutality and for initiating the depopulation of the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, whether by imported diseases or intentional violence.

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.

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Laeticia boudou biography of christopher columbus

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. 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.

Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator. Between and , he made three more voyages to the Caribbean and South America, believing until his death that he had found a shorter route to Asia. Columbus has been credited—and blamed—for opening up the Americas to European colonization. Christopher Columbus, whose real name was Cristoforo Colombo, was born in in the Republic of Genoa, part of what is now Italy.

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. His expeditions marked the beginning of extensive transatlantic exchange, known as the Columbian Exchange.

This exchange involved not only the transfer of goods but also the sharing of cultures, ideas, and, unfortunately, diseases. The arrival of Europeans led to the introduction of horses, wheat, and coffee to the Americas while crops like potatoes and corn became integral to European diets, significantly impacting agricultural practices on both sides of the Atlantic.

However, the legacy of Columbus is complex and controversial. While his discoveries contributed to the rapid expansion of European power, they also resulted in significant suffering and destruction for Indigenous populations. The introduction of Old World diseases like smallpox devastated native communities, effectively decimating their populations.

As a result, the once vibrant cultures of Indigenous peoples were irrevocably altered, leading to loss of identity and heritage. This duality highlights how Columbus, often celebrated as a pioneering explorer, also stands as a symbol of conquest and colonization that irrevocably changed the world. Christopher Columbus, originally known as Cristoforo Colombo, married Filipa Perestrelo in the late s while he was residing in Lisbon, Portugal.

Filipa was the daughter of a prominent nobleman, and their union provided Columbus with valuable connections that might have aided his later expeditions. Together, they had one son, Diego, who was born around Tragically, Filipa passed away when Diego was still a child, which left Columbus to navigate his early fatherhood without her support.

Columbus eventually had a second son, Fernando, born in , with Beatriz Enriquez de Arana, a woman with whom he had a long-term relationship. Unlike Diego, who was recognized as Columbus's legitimate heir, Fernando's status was more complicated due to his illegitimate birth. Columbus's children played varying roles in his legacy; while Diego officially inherited many of Columbus's titles and fortunes, Fernando distanced himself from some of his father's controversial actions.

Together, these children contributed to Columbus's personal life story, reflecting both his ambitions as an explorer and the complexities of his family relationships.