Growth of an Idea: Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies

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Genoa. Christopher Columbus spent his childhood in the northern Italian coastal city of Genoa, a commercial power rich in maritime tradition. Columbus’s father, Domenico, however, was no sailor. Instead he made a comfortable but by no means wealthy living as a wool weaver. Like his father the young Christopher learned to weave wool, but like many Genoese youth at the time, Columbus dreamed of pursuing glory at sea. Abandoning his father’s trade, Columbus in the 1470s ventured out on several Genoese commercial and military expeditions across the Mediterranean Sea. Through the course of his many voyages, Columbus became familiar with the waters of the Mediterranean as well as the practice of navigation. Still in his twenties, Columbus also began to venture out of the Mediterranean on expeditions into the Atlantic Ocean.

Portugal Interlude. On a 1476 voyage along the Portuguese coast on the way to the Low Countries, Columbus’s ship was reportedly sunk during a battle. According to a later biography written by his son Hernando, Columbus managed almost miraculously to survive this disaster by swimming many miles to the safety of the Portuguese shore. Whether or not we believe Hernando’s dramatic claims, we do know that Columbus took up residence in Portugal around 1476 and lived there for nearly a decade. It was during this time that Columbus gradually came to believe in the possibility of sailing to Asia by going west across the Atlantic. The ideas that lay behind Columbus’s “enterprise of the Indies”—his plan to reach Asia by sailing west—were by no means unique to him. Many fifteenth-century scholars had already considered and written about the possibility. Columbus himself retrospectively reported that the thought of two men had proven particularly important in providing scholarly support for his emerging scheme.

D’Ailly. Although Italy was Europe’s center of geographical thought and speculation during the Renaissance, an influential voice from outside the area also contributed significantly to the era’s growing debates concerning the size of the earth and relative positions of its continents. In 1410 the French clergyman Pierre d’Ailly completed his book Imago Mundi (Image of the World), and copies soon circulated throughout Europe. One argument advanced by d’Ailly in this book proved particularly interesting to geographers and sailors across fifteenth-century Europe. Based upon a passage from a book of the Apocrypha (ancient writings considered sacred by some Christians but which had been excluded from the Bible), d’Ailly argued that God had created the earth such that six-sevenths of its surface was covered by land and only one-seventh by water. If that were true and Asia, Africa, and Europe together covered six-sevenths of the earth, then the Atlantic Ocean must be quite small and the spherical globe as a whole much smaller than Eratosthenes and the ancients had imagined. D’Ailly’s ideas in this regard inspired a century of speculation concerning the possibility of sailing west from Europe, across a supposedly small Atlantic Ocean, directly to the ports of East Asia. Columbus was particularly fascinated

by this idea. His personal copy of d’Ailly’s Imago Mundi, in fact, survives today in a library in Seville, Spain, and it is filled with notes scribbled in the margins by Columbus himself.

Toscanelli. Along with d’Ailly the Florentine geographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli proved highly influential in the formulation of Columbus’s plan to reach Asia by sailing west. Born to wealthy Florentine parents, Toscanelli spent much of his life working for the powerful Medici banking family that dominated Florence’s government. Meanwhile, Toscanelli also became a well-respected scholar in his own right, participating actively in the discussions and debates that were so common in his native city concerning geography, politics, and other matters. Based upon what he had learned in his readings of the works of Ptolemy, Strabo, Marco Polo, and other authorities, Toscanelli speculated that the overall size of Asia was probably much larger than previously realized. In a famous 1474 letter to Portuguese king John II, Toscanelli outlined the implications of this idea for European commerce. His letter suggested to the Portuguese monarch that the wealthy ports of East Asia must lay only a few thousand miles off of Europe’s west coast. At the time, the Portuguese had long been engaged in efforts to reach Asia not by sailing west but rather by passing to the south around Africa and then east across the Indian Ocean. Convinced that these attempts would soon lead to success, the Portuguese monarch ignored Toscanelli’s advice. However, while living in Portugal in the early 1480s, the young Genoese sailor Columbus heard about this letter and probably obtained a copy. Later biographers’ reports that Columbus subsequently engaged in a personal correspondence with Toscanelli are almost certainly a myth, but it is true that the ideas in his 1474 letter provided further scholarly support for Columbus’s plan to reach Asia by sailing west.

Source

Pauline Moffit Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise of the Indies,’” American Historical Review, 90 (1985): 73–102.