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Columbus was Italian.
by unmole 3y ago
Columbus was Italian.
- flextheruler 3y agoHe’d have told you he was Genoese if you asked him
- unmole 3y agoHe would have perfectly understood what Italian meant considering the equivalent term was in use for centuries.
- dvt 3y agoHe was famously bankrolled by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.
- gregjor 3y agoQueen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon, who married and then defeated the Emirate of Granada in 1492, the year Columbus sailed to the New World. Spain as a nation didn't exist until then.
- unmole 3y agoSpain as a nation state did not exist then.
- gregjor 3y agoIt existed as a unified kingdom from 1492. A kingdom occupied the same place in international relations and national identity back then that modern nation-states occupy today.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoJust want to nitpick everyone. Spain, less Navarre and Portugal, would have existed as a state at that time, but probably not yet a nation, as I presume the people still saw themselves as Aragonese, etcetera, and not yet Spanish. They even spoke different dialects at the time.
- dvt 3y agoJust to nitpick your nitpick, much of Spain still speaks different dialects (if not different languages entirely). So speaking Catalan is a different thing than speaking Galician, which is very different than the Basque language. There's also Andalusian and the Canarian dialect, among others I probably don't know about.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoAwesome! It's still probably not a nation then. Thanks for the updated info!
- gregjor 3y agoColumbus, 1451-1506 Italy as a nation dates from around 1861. Columbus came from the Republic of Genoa.
- unmole 3y agoWikipedia has a nice note: > Though the modern state of Italy had yet to be established, the Latin equivalent of the term Italian had been in use for natives of the region since antiquity; most scholars believe Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa.
- hulitu 3y agoMaybe Italy as a peninsula. History is written and rewritten by historians.
- gregjor 3y ago"Antiquity" meaning the time of Augustus. By then the Romans had conquered all of the Italian peninsula, including the area in the southern-most tip the Greeks called "Italia." Referring to the people of the peninsula as "Italian" dates from medieval times, not ancient. In Columbus' time the Genoese, the Venetians, the Sardinians, etc. would not have referred to themselves as Italian, as that Roman term for a province (not a single people) had fallen away with the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier.
- unmole 3y ago> had fallen away with the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier. Yeah, no: https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=128 https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=128