Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies
A Brief History with Documents
Geoffrey Symcox, University of California, Los Angeles, and Blair Sullivan, University of California, Los Angeles
Few historical topics are as politically charged as Christopher Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. This is particularly true in the United States, where his arrival set in motion a chain of events that on one hand led to the foundation of this nation, but on the other inaugurated a legacy of colonization, slavery, and the mass extinction of indigenous cultures. More than five hundred years later, Columbus is still a lightning rod in modern identity politics. For both his admirers and detractors, he has become a larger-than-life figure, cast either as the first in a long line of inspired visionaries who laid the foundations for the United States and all it represents in our national consciousness, or as a genocidal marauder whose claim to fame was based more on poor geography than on real achievement. In Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies, Geoffrey Symcox and Blair Sullivan use documents from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to present a historically contextualized portrait of Columbus and his voyages that avoids entanglement in modern ideological debates but remains mindful of the consequences, both positive and negative, of his arrival on the shores of Guanahaní in 1492.
Symcox and Sullivan group the documents for this volume into four sections. The first section provides a biographical background for Columbus and consists of notary documents from his native city of Genoa and descriptions of Columbus written by his contemporaries, as well as a letter written by Columbus in which he describes himself as an instrument of God’s will. These documents reveal much about the attitudes of late-medieval merchants and about how Columbus himself interpreted the significance of his voyages. The second section focuses on the voyages themselves and consists of the legal documentation for the trip, Columbus’s journals and letters describing the New World and explaining his actions there, and the writings of several people who accompanied him. The third section covers the dispute between Spain and Portugal over their rival claims to these new lands, and papal mediation between the two states. The final section consists of early descriptions of the New World, showing how Europeans reacted to their radically different surroundings.
Taken as a whole, this collection provides a detailed picture of Europe at the beginning of the so-called Age of Discovery and places the conquest of the New World into a contemporary context. The Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in 1492 had a very specific view of the world, based on a synthesis of Judeo-Christian tradition and ancient learning. They were in a sense mentally unprepared for the discovery of an entirely new continent that did not fit within their existing ideals, and part of the process of assimilating the New World was to interpret it in familiar terms. Therefore, the explorers projected their desires onto the New World and its inhabitants, and when these did not meet European expectations, the results were often tragic.
Chapter 14 of The Making of the West provides a broader context for Columbus’s voyages and offers more insight into the Age of Discovery. At the time, Europe was also in the midst of an intellectual revolution that placed new value on human endeavors and the acquisition of knowledge. Royal power was rapidly being consolidated during the fifteenth century, and this process had particular importance in Spain, where the expansion of the monarchy and rivalries with other states were among the primary motives in its sponsorship of Columbus’s enterprise. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 prompted a change in the commercial dynamic of the Mediterranean. The expansion of the Islamic Ottoman Empire not only motivated European powers to seek new trade routes, but created the sense that Christendom was under siege and fostered an eschatological mood that influenced how Columbus and others interpreted the discovery of the New World.
By using historical evidence to place Christopher Columbus and his enterprise in the context of his time, one gains a better understanding of his legacy and a new perspective on modern debates.
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