What with all the hullabaloo in these closing days of the 2024 presidential election — the leaping Elon, the “shit Vice President” remark, the fake fry guy act, and the focus on a golfer’s junk — you might have missed the truly history shattering news from Spain ten days ago.
It dealt with a man who served as a factotum for five autocrats — King Rene I of Aragon and count of Barcelona; King Afonso V and his son King Joao I of Portugal; Queen Isabella of Castile; and her husband, King Ferdinand II of Aragon. All were dictators from Day One until the day they died. Each inherited their unchallenged powers and passed them on to their heirs. Each used their power without conscience or constraint. And each sought to exploit, enslave, and exterminate their “subjects” at home and across the seas.
And for over five hundred years this “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” was better know and more admired than the autocrats to whom he knelt in obeisance. But Christopher Columbus’ past was opaque at best and his depredations were whitewashed.
So what could be so history shattering?
A 22-year investigation of Christopher Columbus’ DNA proved it was an 100% match to his brother and son’s DNA. The data was powerful; the genetics were both incontrovertible and easily explainable. Columbus’ parent’s genes flowed into their sons and grandson.
The forensic researchers also concluded that Columbus was a “Sephardic Jew from Western Europe.” His mother was Converso, a Jewish woman who was forced to convert to Catholicism by Castile or Aragon’s autocrats.
That one factoid may be enough to shift Columbus’ birth year from 1451 back to 1442; change when his 14 years at sea began; and explain his service to King Rene I as a corsair or pirate in 1471-72. It would also redefine whose side he fought on — the Portuguese-Norman fleet or a Genoan-Burgundian convoy — in the naval Battle of Cape St. Vincent in August 1476. It disputes his six mile swim to shore after both his his ship and the larger one he grappled burned and sank. And it would certainly change the rationale behind his travels to England, Iceland (if not the Bay of Fundy), and his return to Lisbon in 1477.
All of those events were debated by historians, and distorted by translators for the last five hundred years. All were ignored or twisted beyond recognition in an attempt to hide who Columbus was or to buttress the claim that he was a weaver’s son from Genoa. And both Christopher Columbus and his son, Fernando, were complicit in the ruse.
For each of those events listed above, first appeared in his son’s hagiography: “The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand.” The book was written in Spanish in the 1530s and then published posthumously in Italy in 1571. What lies were told in the original text or were invented during the translation are unknowable. But…
To be clear, virtually none of those events could have (or would have) occurred if it was common knowledge that Columbus was a Sephardic Jew. The antisemitism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was egregious, to put it mildly. And the efforts to force Sephardic Jews to convert to Catholicism in Valencia, Barcelona, and the Balearic Islands were especially intense and murderous.
Yet those regions, not the Piedmont region in Italy, are the most likely places in Western Europe into which Christopher Columbus and his brother Bartholomew entered this world.
Barcelona and the Balearic Islands were where King Rene I sought to end the reign of King Ferdinand I of Aragon, the father of Ferdinand II who married Isabella of Castile. And it is where Columbus’s son bragged about his father serving as a corsair for King Rene.
Mallorca, in the Balearic Islands, was home to Jewish cartographers for centuries until their expulsion in 1492. Jocobis Ribes, also a Converso, left there to direct Henry the Navigator’s school near Sagres, Portugal. And, perhaps, that was how Bartholomew Columbus gained access to the Portuguese court.
Or that Callixtus III, the first Valencian Pope, granted the Portuguese King Afonso V and his brother, Henry the Navigator, a religious monopoly covering all of Africa south of Cape Bajador and all the way to “the Indies” in 1456. Callixtus also made his cousin a cardinal who, as Pope Alexander VI, granted a similar monopoly to Spain.
And so three autocracies — Portugal, Castile, and the Papacy — carved the world into two competing monopolies… to the death-dealing detriment of indigenous peoples on two, then three, and eventually five continents. And not for nothing. For each autocracy benefited massively from the silver and gold extracted, the slaves bought and sold, and the souls forcibly converted to Christianity.
Geneticists may, eventually, move beyond the discovery that Columbus’s DNA is part of the E1b1b haplogroup, the designation for Sephardic Jews. They may pinpoint whether or not Columbus was genetically linked to the Catalan “Colom” or the Balearic “Colom” or, most likely, the Valencian “Colum” as geneticists sought to do thirteen years ago.
But I, for one, think where Colubus was born is immaterial. So are his genetic traits. What occurred in his wakes, however, as an admiral for autocrats was far more insidious than what we were taught to believe about his “sailing the ocean blue.”
Having questioned Columbus back story in “Exception to Their Rule: Basques and Wabanaki in an Age of Autocrats”, I am grateful for the genetic news from Spain. It adds credence to key assertions in my book. To me, Columbus was simply an exemplar of what kneeling in obesience to an autocrat does to a man or woman… an example of how excruciating and demeaning the demands of autocrats can become. For history demonstrates that they are soul-blackening corrupt and every thing they touch becomes rotten to the core.
In the grand scheme of things in the 15th and 16th centuries, Columbus played a bit part in the human tragedies initiated by the autocrats’ greed: the Great Dying, the enslavement and transoceanic transport of 11 million human beings, the theft of land and the wealth of cultures. But those tragedies followed in Columbus’s wakes for he, too, sought to be the viceroy of all the lands he ‘discovered’.
And yet, and yet, I also know that the Knights of Columbus, his Italian-American advocates, and even some Sephardic Jews may find the news about this five hundred year old legend more than a bit disconcerting. They trusted the histories written for, and the historians paid by, those same autocrats. And their lies travelled around the globe for centuries until the truth finally caught up to them.
As indigenous peoples on four if not five continents learned the hard way, the autocrats’ and their factotums had the same modus operandi: prevarication, corruption, exploitation, enslavement, and extermination. Today we call it ethnic cleansing. Sadly, it remains a chapter in the autocrats’ playbook… not just five hundred years ago… not just two hundred fifty years ago… not just seventy-five years ago... but even TODAY.
It has never, ever been the game plan of small-d democrats. In fact, like the Basques and the Wabanaki that I wrote about, Democracy and its warriors always responded by fighting back, fighting against overwhelming odds, and fighting for their freedoms and their familes, their cosmologies and their cultures, and, most important, the future of their beloved country.
Can we do any less?
Vote! Vote!! Vote!!!