Origin theories of Christopher Columbus

The ethnic or national origin of explorer Christopher Columbus (1450 or 1451 – 1506) has been a source of speculation since the 19th century. The consensus among historians is that Columbus's family was from the coastal region of Liguria, that he was born and spent his boyhood and early youth in the Republic of Genoa, in Genoa, in Vico Diritto, and that he subsequently lived in Savona, where his father Domenico moved in 1470. Much evidence derives from documents concerning Columbus's immediate family connections in Genoa and opinions voiced by contemporaries on his Genoese origins, which few dispute.
Other hypotheses exist, none of which are broadly accepted. Reviewing them, British historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes:
In a 1498 deed of primogeniture, Columbus writes:
Many historians affirm the document's authenticity; others believe it apocryphal. Some believe that the fact that it was produced in court, during a lawsuit among the heirs of Columbus, in 1578, does not strengthen the case for its authenticity.
A letter from Columbus, dated 2 April 1502, to the Bank of Saint George, the oldest and most reputable of Genoa's financial institutions, begins with the words:
Though some people consider this letter unreliable, the majority of scholars believe it genuine. Examination by graphologists testifies in favour of authenticity. The letter is one of a group of documents entrusted by Columbus to a Genoese friend, after the negative experiences of his third voyage, before setting out on his fourth.
In the spring of 1502, Columbus collected notarized copies of all the writings concerned with his rights to the discovery of new lands. He sent these documents to Nicolò Oderico, ambassador of the Republic of Genoa. To Oderico he also gave "the letter to the Bank of Saint George", in which he announced that he was leaving the bank one-tenth of his income, with a recommendation for his son Diego. Oderico returned to Genoa and delivered the letter to the bank. The bank replied on 8 December 1502, lauding the gesture of their "renowned fellow-citizen" towards his "native land". The reply, unfortunately, never reached its destination; Columbus, back in Castile after his fourth voyage, complained about this in another letter to Ambassador Oderico, dated 27 December 1504, and promptly annulled the bequest.
The first letter was preserved in the archives of the Bank of Saint George until it was taken over by the municipality of Genoa; the other three remained in the Oderico family archives until 1670, when they were donated to the Republic of Genoa. After the fall of the Republic, they passed to the library of one of its last senators, Michele Cambiaso, and were finally acquired by the city of Genoa. There are also public and notarial acts (more than a hundred) — copies of which are conserved in the archives of Genoa and Savona — regarding Columbus's father, Columbus himself, his grandfather, and his relatives.
A biography written by Columbus's son Ferdinand (in Spanish and translated into Italian), Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo; nelle quali s'ha particolare, et vera relatione della vita, et de' fatti dell'Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre; Et dello scoprimento, ch'egli fece delle Indie Occidentali, dette Nuovo Mondo ("Accounts of His Lordship Ferdinand Columbus; among which there are particulars and a true relation of the life, and of the deeds of the Admiral, Sir Christopher Columbus, his father; and of the discovery, which he made, of the West Indies, called the New World," abbreviated as "The life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his son Ferdinand"), exists. In it, Ferdinand claimed that his father was of Italian aristocracy. He describes Columbus to be a descendant of a Count Columbo of the Castle Cuccaro (Montferrat). Columbo was in turn said to be descended from a legendary Roman General Colonius. It is now widely believed that Christopher Columbus used this persona to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy, an elaborate illusion to mask a humble merchant background. Ferdinand dismissed the fanciful story that the Admiral descended from the Colonus mentioned by Tacitus. However, he refers to "those two illustrious Coloni, his relatives." According to Note 1, on page 287, these two "were corsairs not related to each other or to Christopher Columbus, one being Guillame de Casenove, nicknamed Colombo, Admiral of France in the reign of Louis XI". At the top of page 4, Ferdinand listed Nervi, Cogoleto, Bogliasco, Savona, Genoa and Piacenza (all inside the former Republic of Genoa) as possible places of origin. He also stated:
In chapter ii, Ferdinand accuses Agostino Giustiniani of telling lies about the discoverer:
In chapter v, he writes:
Ferdinand also says (chapter xi) that before he was declared admiral, his father used to sign himself "Columbus de Terra rubra," that is to say, Columbus of Terrarossa, a village or hamlet near Genoa. In another passage, Ferdinand says that his father went to Lisbon and taught his brother Bartholomew to construct sea charts, globes and nautical instruments; and sent this brother to England to make proposals to Henry VII of his desired voyage. Finally, Ferdinand says incidentally (chapter lxxii) that Christopher's brother, Bartholomew Columbus named the new settlement Santo Domingo in memory of their father, Domenico.
The publication of Historie has been used by historians as providing indirect evidence about the Genoese origin of Columbus.
In April 1501, in the feverish atmosphere of the discovery, Nicolò Oderico, ambassador of the Genoese Republic, after praising the Catholic Sovereigns, went on to say that they "discovered with great expenditure hidden and inaccessible places under the command of Columbus, our fellow-citizen, and having tamed wild barbarians and unknown peoples, they educated them in religion, manners and laws". Furthermore, two diplomats from Venice added the appellation "Genoese" to Columbus's name: the first, Angelo Trevisan, in 1501, the second, Gasparo Contarini, in 1525. In 1498, Pedro de Ayala, Spanish ambassador to the English court, mentioned John Cabot, "the discoverer, another Genoese, like Columbus". All these references were published, along with reproductions of some of the original documents, in the City of Genoa volume of 1931.
The historian Bartolomé de las Casas, whose father traveled with Columbus on his second journey and who personally knew Columbus's sons, writes in chapter 2 of his Historia de las Indias:
The historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, writes that Domenico Colombo was the Admiral's father; and in chapter 2, book 3 of his Historia general y natural de las Indias:
Many contemporary writers agree that the discoverer was Genoese:
Columbus's Genoese birth is confirmed by the works of the English Hakluyt (1601), of the Spaniard Antonio de Herrera (1612), the great Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega (1614), a paper manuscript dated 1626, conserved in Madrid's National Library, the works of the German Filioop Cluwer (1677), the German Giovanni Enrico Alsted (1649), the French Dionisio Petau (1724), and the Spaniard Luigi de Marmol (1667). This list represents the early writings of non-Italians. In addition, there were sixty-two Italian testimonies between 1502 and 1600. Of these, fourteen are from Ligurian writers.
Conformable to the testament in Seville (3 July 1539) is the evidence of Ferdinand Columbus, who states that his father was conterraneo (of the same country) with Mons. Agostino Giustiniani, who was, beyond all doubt, born at Genoa:
Other testimony of contemporary or succeeding authors include:
Most scholars agree that Columbus was Genoese.
Samuel Eliot Morison, in his book Christopher Columbus: Admiral of the Ocean Sea, notes that many existing legal documents demonstrate the Genoese origin of Columbus, his father Domenico, and his brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo (Diego). These documents, written in Latin by notaries, were legally valid in Genoese courts. The documents, uncovered in the 19th century when Italian historians examined the Genoese archives, form part of the Raccolta Colombiana. On page 14, Morison writes:
On the topic of Columbus's being born somewhere besides Genoa, Morison states:
Paolo Emilio Taviani, in his book Cristoforo Colombo: Genius of the Sea discusses "the public and notarial acts – original copies of which are conserved in the archives of Genoa and Savona – regarding Columbus's father, Columbus himself, his grandfather, and his relatives." In Columbus the Great Adventure he further claims that Columbus named the small island of Saona "to honor Michele da Cuneo, his friend from Savona."
This is fully accepted by Consuelo Varela Bueno, "Spain's leading authority on the texts, documents, and handwriting of Columbus." She devotes several pages to the question of Columbus native land, and concludes that "all chroniclers of that period wrote that he was from Liguria in northern Italy." The evidence supporting the Genoese origin of Columbus is also discussed by Miles H. Davidson. In his book Columbus Then and Now: A Life Reexamined, he writes:
The spoken language of Genoa and the Ligurian coast would primarily have been Ligurian. The Italian language was originally based on the fourteenth century vernacular of Florence in the adjacent region of Tuscany, and would not have been the main spoken language of Genoa in the fifteenth century.
Although Columbus wrote almost exclusively in Spanish, there is a small handwritten Genoese gloss in a 1498 Italian (from Venice) edition of Pliny's Natural History that he read after his second voyage to America: this shows Columbus was able to write in Genoese and read Italian. There is also a note in Italian in his own Book of Prophecies exhibiting, according to historian August Kling, "characteristics of northern Italian humanism in its calligraphy, syntax, and spelling". Phillips and Phillips point out that 500 years ago, the Romance languages had not distanced themselves to the degree they have today. Bartolomé de las Casas in his Historia de las Indias claimed that Columbus did not know Spanish well and that he was not born in Castile.
Valiant scholars have dedicated themselves to the subject of Christopher Columbus's language. They have conducted in-depth research both on the ship's log and on other writings of his that have come down to the modern day. They have analyzed the words, the terms, and the vocabulary, as well as rather frequent variations often bizarre in style, handwriting, grammar, and syntax. Christopher Columbus's language is Castilian punctuated by noteworthy and frequent Portuguese, Italian, and Genoese influences and elements.
There is a document dated 22 September 1470 in which the criminal judge convicts Domenico Colombo. The conviction is tied to the debt of Domenico — together with his son Christopher (explicitly stated in the document) — toward a certain Girolamo del Porto. In the will dictated by Admiral Christopher Columbus in Valladolid before he died, the authentic and indisputable document which we have today, the dying navigator remembers this old debt, which had evidently not been paid. There is, in addition, the act drawn in Genoa on 25 August 1479 by a notary, Girolamo Ventimiglia. This act is known as the Assereto document, after the scholar who found it in the State Archives in Genoa in 1904. It involves a lawsuit over a sugar transaction on the Atlantic island Madeira. In it, young Christopher swore that he was a 27-year-old Genoese citizen resident in Portugal and had been hired to represent the Genoese merchants in that transaction. Here was proof that he had relocated to Portugal. It is important to bear in mind that at the time when Assereto traced the document, it would have been impossible to make an acceptable facsimile. Nowadays, with modern chemical processes, a document can be "manufactured", made to look centuries old if need be, with such skill that it may be difficult to prove it is a fake. In 1960, this was still impossible.
In addition to the two documents cited, there are others that confirm the identification of the Genoese Christopher Columbus, son of Domenico, with the admiral of Spain. An act dated 11 October 1496 says:
In a fourth notarial act, drawn in Savona on 8 April 1500, Sebastiano Cuneo, heir by half to his father Corrado, requested that Christopher and Giacomo (called Diego), the sons and heirs of Domenico Colombo, be summoned to court and sentenced to pay the price for two lands located in Legine. This document confirms Christoforo and Diego's absence from the Republic of Genoa with these exact words: "dicti conventi sunt absentes ultra Pisas et Niciam."
A fifth notarial act, drawn in Savona on 26 January 1501, is more explicit. A group of Genoese citizens, under oath, said and say, together and separately and in every more valid manner and guise, that Christopher, Bartholomew and Giacomo Columbus, sons and heirs of the aforementioned Domenico, their father, have for a long time been absent from the city and the jurisdiction of Savona, as well as Pisa and Nice in Provence, and that they reside in the area of Spain, as was and is well known.
Finally, there is a sixth document from the notary of Bartolomeo Oddino, drawn in Savona on 30 March 1515. With this notarial act, Leon Pancaldo, the well-known Savonese who would become one of the pilots for Magellan's voyage, sends his own father-in-law in his place as procurator for Diego Columbus, son of Admiral Christopher Columbus. The document demonstrates how the ties, in part economic, of the discoverer's family with Savona survived even his death.
Salvador de Madariaga argued in 1940 that Columbus was a marrano forced to leave Spain for Genoa. Scholars such as Jose Erugo, Celso Garcia de la Riega, Otero Sanchez and Nicholas Dias Perez have since concluded that Columbus may have had a Jewish background. This hypothesis is founded on many observations about Columbus, for example: his reference to the expulsion of the Jews in his first accounts, the reference to the Second Temple of Jerusalem by the Hebraic term "Second House", the Hebrew letters bet-hei (meaning B'ezrat hashem) on all but one of his letters to his son, and an anagram that was a cryptic substitute for the Kaddish, according to Cecil Roth.
Another claimed piece of evidence lies in the fact that many of the personalities who supported Columbus before the kings were of Jewish origin and that his voyage was mainly funded by two Jewish conversos and a prominent Jew: Luis de Santángel, Gabriel Sánchez (treasurer of the Crown of Aragón, d. 1505), and Don Isaac Abarbanel, respectively.
In a 1973 book, Simon Wiesenthal postulated that Columbus was a Sephardi, careful to conceal his Judaism yet also eager to locate a place of refuge for his persecuted countrymen. Wiesenthal argued that Columbus's concept of sailing west to reach the Indies was less the result of geographical theories than of his faith in certain Biblical texts—specifically the Book of Isaiah. He repeatedly cited two verses from that book: "Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them," (60:9); and "For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth" (65:17). Wiesenthal claimed that Columbus felt that his voyages had confirmed these prophecies. Jane Francis Amler shared those views in 1977. Estelle Irizarry echoed this as well, further noting that Columbus always wrote in Spanish, occasionally included Hebrew in his writing, and referenced the Jewish High Holidays in his journal during the first voyage.
A document suggests that Columbus belonged to a Marrano family from Majorcan origin. However the authenticity of the document hasn't been proved. The novelist Robert Graves argued: "his surname is still common in the island."
An international study, initiated in 2001 and led by forensic scientist and professor at the University of Granada, José Antonio Lorente, claimed on October 12, 2024, that Christopher Columbus was of Sephardic Jewish origin by examining the DNA in bone fragments of his remains in Seville Cathedral, and matching them with Columbus' two sons buried in the same cathedral, stating that "Both in the 'Y' chromosome and in the mitochondrial chromosome of Ferdinand Columbus there are traits compatible with Jewish origin" and stating that he was likely born somewhere in the Crown of Aragon. However, the study has not been peer-reviewed, as is standard for scientific publishments and publications, and the data on which the conclusion is drawn has not been made available for review by other scientists. In response, many historians dismissed the claim, making reference to the abundance of available sources showing Columbus was from Genoa, Italy.
A complicating factor of the alleged Jewish origin of Columbus lies in the Alhambra Decree of 1492. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella from Spain ordered the expulsion of all Jews and the dissolution of Jewish property from their kingdoms. In a matter of months, Spanish Jews were forced to renounce their faith and leave the country, leaving all properties behind. Columbus was insistent that his ships sail before midnight of the day (3 August, 1492) when the edict of expulsion was to go into effect.
Since the early 20th century, researchers have attempted to connect Columbus to the Catalan-speaking areas of Spain, usually based on linguistic evidence. The first to propose a birthplace under the Crown of Aragon was Peruvian historian Luis Ulloa in a book originally published in 1927 in French. Antonio Ballesteros Beretta, University of Madrid historian of America, said that Ulloa's "fiery imagination" had placed abstruse interpretations on court documents to support his thesis, had found no positive proof, and had dismissed as false any evidence supporting a Genoese origin.
Throughout Columbus's life, he referred to himself as Christobal Colom; his contemporaries and family also referred to him as such. This is opposed to the Genoese translation "Cristoffa Corombo", or even the Italian "Cristoforo Colombo". It is possible that Colom is the shortened form of the Italian surname Colombo (which means "dove"), although his surname in Genoese would have been Corombo. Colom can also be a Portuguese, French, or Catalan name, and in the latter means "dove".
Some more recent studies also state Columbus had Catalan origins, based on his handwriting, though these have been disputed. Charles J. Merrill, a specialist in medieval Catalan literature at Mount St. Mary's University, claims Columbus's handwriting is typical of a native Catalan, and his mistakes in Castilian are "most likely" transfer errors from Catalan, with examples such as "a todo arreo" (a tot arreu), "todo de un golpe" (tot d'un cop), "setcentas" (set-centes), "nombre" (instead of número), "al sol puesto" (el sol post). Merrill states that the Genoese Cristoforo Colombo was a modest wool carder and cheese merchant with no maritime training and whose age does not match the one of Columbus. Merrill's book Colom of Catalonia was published in 2008.
Patrocínio Ribeiro claimed that Columbus was Portuguese in 1916, and Moisés Bensabat Amzalak hypothesized on Columbus's signature with the Kabbalah. Based on those theories, José Mascarenhas Barreto argued in 1988, that Columbus was a Portuguese agent who hatched up an elaborate diversion to keep the Spanish from the lucrative trade routes, and suggested he was born in Cuba, Portugal, while his real name was supposedly Salvador Fernandes Zarco. The Portuguese hypothesis of Zarco from Cuba was further expanded upon in 2008 by Manuel Luciano daSilva and Sylvia Jorge daSilva who included an analysis of Columbus's signature on documents in the Vatican archives. However, the Zarco genealogy as presented by these authors has been disputed.
In his latest book as of 2023, Professor João Paulo Oliveira e Costa, the Chair of the Department of History at NOVA University Lisbon, wrote that it is now "clear the impossibility of Colón having been born into a family of Genoese weavers." Proponents of the Portuguese hypothesis also point to a court document which stated that Columbus's nationality was "Portuguese" and in another, Columbus uses the words "my homeland" in relation to Portugal.
Other theories claim that Columbus was a Byzantine Greek nobleman and the nephew of George Paléologos de Bissipat, a Sardinian nobleman, a Norwegian of Swedish descent, a Scot, or that he was the son of King Władysław III of Varna. Many cities have been hypothesized as the birthplace of Columbus, notably Calvi in Corsica, which in Columbus's times was under Genoese rule.