The First Wise Traveler to the West - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 11

The child who became Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa in 1421, the son of
Domenico Colombo, a wool merchant and weaver, and his wife, Susanna Fontanarosa. The
baptismal records carry the son's name as Cristoforo Colombo. By tradition, sons followed
fathers into the family trade. But Cristoforo shipped out to sea sometime between the ages
of ten and fourteen. His early years are recorded by his second son, Ferdinand, whose tomb
is at the foot of his father's in the great Cathedral in Seville.
According to Cristoforo's own account, the great turning point in his life was a pirate
attack in 1476 off the coast of Portugal. Cristoforo was age twenty-five, and with bravery
and stamina he swam many leagues to shore and made his way to Lisbon, where his broth-
er Bartholomew (Bartolomeo) worked as a chart maker. The man who emerged from the
sea was striking in appearance. In an age when most Mediterranean Europeans were short
in stature, Cristoforo stood more than six feet tall. He had reddish, blond hair and grey
eyes. He was never heard speaking the Genoa dialect but did write and converse in related
languages: Portuguese, Castilian, and Latin, the language of the learned. In Lisbon, Cristo-
foro displayed a talent that would serve him all his life. He was a charming and persuas-
ive speaker, and he accomplished an unheard-of leap, changing his status from an ordinary
sailor to a member of the Portuguese aristocracy by marrying a woman considerably above
his social station, Beatriz Perestrello. They went to Madeira, where Beatriz's brother was
hereditary ruler of Santos, one of the small Madeiras. And it is there that Cristoforo con-
ceived what he would call the Enterprise of the Indies.
Cristoforo never called himself Christopher Columbus. After reaching the New World
and mindful of his mission to bring Christianity to the natives of the region, he began to
call himself Cristobal Colon—bringer of Christianity to the colonies. As to his current re-
cognizable name, that is a coinage that followed the American Revolution. The new nation
needed a hero who was neither English nor too European. The answer seems to have been
provided by Washington Irving, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow . Cristobal Co-
lon became Christopher Columbus, a name that seizes the popular imagination.
WHY THE ENTERPRISE OF THE INDIES?
The Enterprise of the Indies has its roots in the Great Crusades. In 1095, on a hillside in
Clermont, France, Pope Urban called on Christian warriors to liberate the Holy Land from
its Muslim overlords. Urban's motives were unclear and are still debated, but the Crusades
that followed were an uneven amalgam of religious piety, secular greed and ambition, and
a lust for war and adventure.
The First Crusade stormed into Jerusalem in 1098, horses knee-deep in blood and
knights slaughtering enemies and innocents alike. European invaders established kingdoms
all across the Near East (Latin Kingdoms: Frankish kingdoms is their usual name), building
great castles to defend their regimes. From triumph in 1098 to the final Muslim counter-