Pallavi subhash biography of christopher columbus

Columbus founded a colony in today's Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniolawhich became the colonial headquarters for later Spanish explorations and the eventual conquest of powerful empires and tribal peoples from Mexicothe Caribbeanand South America. Columbus' engagement with largely peaceful Indians was often brutal, and his objective of Christianizing native inhabitants was callously compromised by the expedition's quest for gold and the capture and enslavement of Indians.

In the decades after Columbus' voyage, Spanish Conquistadors would overthrow the Aztec and Incan civilizations through superior military technology, singular acts of treachery, and the willing support of subject populations who lived in fear of mass ritual human sacrifice and other forms of oppression. Native American populations throughout the Western hemisphere would be decimated through colonial occupation by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English, largely through epidemic diseases brought by The anniversary of the voyage is observed as Columbus Day throughout the Americas and in Spain.

In recent years, the calamitous consequences of European colonization upon Native American life has been emphasized, while Columbus' extraordinary courage and vision, and the historic movement toward a common human destiny initiated through contact have been construed as a dated evaluation of the explorer that marginalizes the near total subjugation of Native American peoples.

According to the most widely acknowledged biographies, Columbus was born between August and Octoberin Genoa. His father was Domenico Colombo, a middle-class wool weaver working between Genoa and Savona. His mother was Susanna Fontanarossa. Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino, and Giacomo were his brothers. Bartolomeo worked in a cartography workshop in Lisbon for at least part of his adulthood.

While information about Columbus' early years is scarce, he probably received an incomplete education. He spoke a Genoese dialect. In one of his writings, Columbus claims to have gone to the sea at the age of Inthe Columbus family moved to Savona, where Domenico took over a tavern. InColumbus began his apprenticeship as business agent for the important Centurione, Di Negro, and Spinola families of Genoa.

Later, he allegedly made a trip to Chios, in the Aegean Sea. In Mayhe took part in an armed convoy sent by Genoa to carry a valuable cargo to pallavi subhash biography of christopher columbus Europe. He docked in Bristol, Galway, in Ireland and very likely, inhe was in Iceland. InColumbus reached his brother Bartolomeo in Lisbon, keeping on trading for the Centurione family.

Inhis son, Diego was born. No authentic contemporary portrait of Christopher Columbus exists. Over the years historians have presented many images that reconstruct his appearance from written descriptions. They depict him variously with long or short hair, heavy or thin, bearded or clean-shaven, stern or at ease. Columbus is described as having reddish hair which turned to white early-on in life and a reddish face typically resulting from a lighter skinned person receiving too much sun exposure.

Columbus first presented his plan for a western route to the Indies to the court of Portugal in The king's experts believed that the route would be longer than Columbus thought the actual distance is even longer than the Portuguese believedand they denied Columbus' request. It is probable that he made the same outrageous demands for himself in Portugal that he later made in Spain, where he went next.

He tried to get backing from the monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, who, by marrying, had united the largest kingdoms of Spain and were ruling them together. After seven years of lobbying at the Spanish court, where he was kept on a salary to prevent him from taking his ideas elsewhere, he was finally successful in Isabel finally turned Columbus down on the advice of her confessor, and he was leaving town in despair, when Fernando intervened.

Isabel then sent a royal guard to fetch him and Ferdinand later rightfully claimed credit for being "the principal cause why those islands were discovered. About half of the financing was to come from private Italian investors, whom Columbus had already lined up. Financially broken from the Granada campaign, the monarchs left it to the royal treasurer to shift funds among various royal accounts on behalf of the enterprise.

According to the contract that Columbus made with King and Queen, if Columbus discovered any new islands or mainland, he would:. The terms were extraordinary, but as his own son later wrote, the monarchs did not really expect him to return. Christian Europe, which had long enjoyed safe passage to India and China —sources of valued goods such as silk and spices—under the hegemony of the Mongol Empire the Pax Mongolica, or "Mongol peace"was by the fifteenth century, after the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire, under complete economic blockade by Muslim states.

In response to Muslim domination on land, Portugal sought an eastward sea route to the Indies, and promoted the establishment of trading posts and later colonies along the African coast. Columbus had a different idea. By the s, he had developed a plan to travel to the Indies then construed roughly as all of south and east Asia by instead sailing directly west across the "Ocean Sea" the Atlantic.

It is sometimes claimed that the reason Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan was that Europeans believed that the earth was flat. Eratosthenes B. Most scholars accepted Ptolemy 's claim that the terrestrial landmass for Europeans of the time, comprising Eurasia and Africa occupied degrees of the terrestrial sphere, leaving degrees of water.

Finally, he read maps as if the distances were calculated in Italian miles meters or feet. Columbus did not realize that Alfraganus used the much longer Arabic mile of about meters. He was not alone in "wishing" the earth smaller, however. A stunning image of the virtual Earth inside his mind survives to this day in a globe finished inby Martin Behaim of Nuremberg, Germany, "the Earthapple.

The problem facing Columbus was that most experts did not agree with his estimate of the distance to the Indies. The true circumference of the Earth is some 40, km 24, statute miles of feet eachand the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan is some 10, nautical miles 19, km. No ship in the fifteenth century could carry enough food or sail fast enough from the Canary Islands to Japan.

Those experts were right, of course, but Spain, tenuously unified through the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, then suddenly unified in faith after an eight century struggle with the Muslims—followed by the expulsion of the Jews that same eventful year of —was in a messianic fever and desperate for a competitive edge over Portugal.

The Portuguese had managed to circumnavigate Africa and were poised to establish trade with "the East Indies" all of Asia. Archived from the original on 14 June The New Indian Express. The Indian Express. Retrieved 24 September Archived from the original on 1 December Retrieved 12 December The Hindu. Sunday Observer. Retrieved 21 February My Mahanagar in Marathi.

Retrieved 25 September Archived from the original on 24 January Kollywood Zone". Retrieved 29 September Retrieved 13 February — via YouTube. Indian Television Dot Com. Retrieved 29 January Retrieved 21 December Retrieved 5 July — via YouTube. Retrieved 30 January Lokmat in Marathi. Retrieved 19 April Retrieved 26 September Retrieved 10 September — via YouTube.

Retrieved 14 July — via YouTube. January Retrieved 3 July India Today. Retrieved 13 August External links [ edit ]. 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 injust 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 pallavi subhash biography of christopher columbus 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.

Madrid: Ferdinand Columbus: Renaissance Collector — British Museum Press. The Columbian Exchange. CRC Press. In Horodowich, Elizabeth; Markey, Lia eds. Retrieved 10 April August Retrieved 16 March Archived from the original on 26 May Retrieved 12 October University of Chicago Press. Phillips Jr. University of Oklahoma Press. Encyclopedia of North American Indians.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Or "these people are very simple as regards the use of arms A Brief History of the Caribbean. University of Alabama Press. Proceedings of the British Academy. Retrieved 24 January University of Toronto Press. Confronting Columbus: An Anthology. Retrieved 28 February The Journal of Christopher Columbus. London: Hakluyt Society.

Portuguese Studies. Spain, — A Society of Conflict. King's College London. Archived from the original on 24 April Retrieved 15 January Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, — Winius, George D. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. And it's not just the artifacts involved". Miami Herald. Archived from the original on 23 February Retrieved 22 February Latin American Studies.

Antonio Rafael de la Cova. Retrieved 10 July University of New Mexico Press. The Journal of Economic History. McAlister Spain and Portugal in the New World, — University of Minnesota Press. Edited and Translated by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: The Heritage Press, Edited and translated by Benjamin Keen. Bourne editors. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,pp.

Columbus, His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 83— Archived from the original on 21 November Retrieved 25 May The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton University Press. In Allen, John Logan ed. North American Exploration. University of Nebraska Press. Transaction Publishers. The Caribbean as Columbus Saw it.

Little, Brown. Christopher Columbus: Controversial Explorer of the Americas. Cavendish Square. In Haase, Wolfgang; Meyer, Reinhold eds. The Guardian. Retrieved 16 May Retrieved 12 August The Life of Christopher Columbus. Prabhat Prakashan. Columbus on himself. 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.

Pallavi subhash biography of christopher columbus

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.

Columbus continued to lobby the royal court, and soon, the Spanish army captured the last Muslim stronghold in Granada in January Shortly thereafter, the monarchs agreed to finance his expedition. On October 12,after 36 days of sailing westward across the Atlantic, Columbus and several crewmen set foot on an island in present-day Bahamas, claiming it for Spain.