Power and Patronage: Columbus’s Search for Financial Support

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Searching for a Patron. Driven by his belief in the possibility of quickly reaching Asia by sailing west, as well as by his notion of having a divinely ordained role in preparing the world for the apocalypse, Christopher Columbus in the 1480s actively sought financial support for his ambitious scheme. Columbus first brought his “enterprise of the Indies” to the attention of Portuguese king John II, who was initially excited by the idea. In 1484 or 1485, however, a crown-appointed committee of Portuguese scholars rejected Columbus’s plan as unsound. The committee’s decision was not, contrary to popular myth, founded upon a rejection of the idea that the earth was round. The committee’s decision was based upon three considerations. First, the committee believed that Eratosthenes’s ancient estimate of an earth nearly twenty-five thousand miles in circumference was correct. Second, they rejected as misguided Pierre d’Ailly’s underestimation of the size of the Atlantic Ocean. Third, they similarly rejected Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli’s estimation of the size of Asia as exaggerated. In short they argued that if their calculations were correct Asia simply lay too far away to be reached by European vessels sailing west. In fact we retrospectively know that it was the committee members and not Columbus who held the more accurate view of East Asia’s location on the globe and its distance from Europe’s western shores. Neither the committee nor Columbus, of course, realized that there were actually two large continents heretofore unknown to Europeans standing between Europe and Asia. By being correct, ironically, the committee members’ decisions prevented Portugal from becoming the first European state to access the as-yet-unforeseen riches of the Americas. Although disheartened by the Portuguese crown’s rejection, Columbus did not simply give up. Instead he left Portugal in 1485 and went to Spain, where he hoped to secure the backing of the powerful monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand.

Rejection in Spain. When Columbus first proposed his plan to the Spanish crown in 1486, Isabella and Ferdinand were engaged in a costly war against the Muslim kingdom of Granada in southern Spain. Financially burdened by the war, the Catholic monarchs had little money to spare to fund expeditions such as the one offered by Columbus. Nonetheless the Genoese mariner’s scheme interested them enough to appoint a committee to study his proposal. Like the Portuguese committee before it, however, the assembled group of Spanish scholars rejected Columbus’s plans as unsound. Again disheartened, Columbus in 1488 returned briefly to Portugal to present his case anew to the Portuguese king. Unfortunately for Columbus, however, he arrived in Lisbon just as the Portuguese mariner Bartholomeu Dias was returning from his landmark voyage with the news that he had reached the southern tip of the African continent. From the point of view of the Portuguese crown, Columbus’s proposed scheme was unnecessary and redundant since Portuguese ships would soon be making regular trips directly to the ports of Asia by rounding Africa.

Reconsideration. Realizing the hopelessness of gaining Portuguese support, Columbus once again returned to Spain in hope that Isabella and Ferdinand would reconsider. A second Spanish royal commission in 1491, however, again rejected Columbus’s scheme. Weary from his failures in Iberia, Columbus planned to set off for the north, hoping that the king of France might be more helpful. Fortunately for Columbus, however, Isabella and Ferdinand on 2 January 1492 finally concluded their war with Granada by obtaining a surrender agreement from the city’s Muslim emir. Freed from their wartime financial burdens and anxious not to let the Asian trade fall exclusively into the hands of the Portuguese, the Catholic monarchs ignored their advisors and decided to take a chance on Columbus’s eccentric scheme. After having visited the king and queen in Granada and heard of the commission’s rejection of his idea, however, Columbus had already set off for France by the time Isabella and Ferdinand finally decided to finance the expedition. The crown’s messengers caught up with the dejected Columbus some twelve miles north of Granada. From there, as one recent historian has so dramatically put it, Columbus “turned back to Granada and into the pages of history.”

Source

William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992).