By the mid-15th century, much of Western Europe was still struggling to recover from the calamities of the previous century. In France, Charles VII’s generals were about to put an end to the Hundred Years War by driving the English out of their last province – 25 years after a teen-age peasant girl from Lorraine, believing that voices of saints were urging her to expel the English, had roused her country into action, saving all France from near certain defeat. For her part in this miraculous turn of events, Joan d’Arc had meanwhile been condemned as a sorceress and been burned at the stake in the city of Rouen.
England had problems of her own at home, where the noble houses of York, whose badge was the white rose, and the house of Lancaster, later associated with the red rose, were about to begin a long and bitter struggle for the throne of England. These so-called Wars of the Roses would cost among so many lives that of mentally ill Henry VI, his son Edward’s, and those of scores of English noblemen. Not until 1485, when Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond, ascended the throne as Henry VII, was this struggle finally ended. By marrying the daughter of Edward IV, Henry also united the houses of Lancaster and York, and with that began the nearly 120 years of English rule by the Tudor family.
In Germany, Frederick III was about to leave for Rome, while his Swiss, Austrian and Hungarian subjects rose in indignant revolt. The ambitious Frederick had apparently pledged his and his countrymen’s undying obedience to the Pope in return for the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor. Incensed as they were, however, the German electors were unable to agree on any one man as a qualified replacement for their king, and in 1452 Frederick became emperor, the last to be crowned in Rome. And in the East, the final curtain of a centuries-long drama was about to fall as Sultan Mehmet and his Ottoman Turks besieged and once and for all captured and held the ancient Byzantine capital and fortress of Constantinople.
But the medieval Europe of old had already begun to change. Trade and commerce were expanding rapidly; schools and universities were being founded in increasing numbers; and everywhere throughout the Western kingdoms the printing presses were already approaching the first million printed books. The Renaissance of Western life was just beginning. Still to come was a whole galaxy of names that would outshine all that had gone before them. The world had yet to experience the power of Michelangelo’s talents; no Albrecht Duerer had as yet appeared, no Titian, no Reubens, and Rembrandt’s birth was still 150 years away. Rabelais’ Gargantua had yet to be created, and not for another century and a half would Cervantes produce his Don Quixote or William Shakespeare the immortal Hamlet. Copernicus had yet to show that the Earth moves around the sun, not vice versa, and the 400-year old Tower of Pisa still had a long wait for Galileo Galilei. Indignant religious reformers had not yet a Martin Luther to set them afire.
But Italy, that confusing jumble of independent cities and town-states, produced in the year 1452 two sons who forever after would inspire men, each in his own way. In April of that year, in the compartimento of Toscana, in the small town of Vinci, the infant Leonardo saw the first light of life, and began his journey into immortality. And sometime in the autumn of that same year, in the ancient town of Genoa, a woolweaver named Domenico Colombo and his wife Giacomo celebrated the birth of their first child, a boy whom they named Cristofero.
The exact date of Christopher Columbus’ birth is not known; no records exist of the event, and no records reveal anything of the early years of this obscure young Genoese, whose father was barely able to support his growing family. Much later, this lack of official records inspired all sorts of rumors about Columbus; at one time or another he was proven to have had a Castilian background, or Corsican, Portuguese, French, German, Irish, and was even suspected of having been a native-born American, a descendant of Eric the Red, who had somehow made his way to Spain and then set out again, pretending to discover his own homeland. But there is no doubt that Columbus was anything but what he himself claimed to be – a Genoa-born Catholic of humble origins. No one who knew him during his own lifetime, no one who wrote about him for centuries thereafter, seems to have had any questions about his origin.
Growing up in Genoa, a city whose commerce was conducted largely by sea, young Christopher undoubtedly made many coastal voyages from an early age on. By the mid-1470s, at any rate, he had entered the services of merchants of that city, whose financial interests extended from the coast of Africa to England and the North Sea. For more than four years he spent much of his time at sea, and in his letters described voyages to the Aegean, to Tunis, to England, and even to Iceland. While still in his twenties, Christopher Columbus had already become an expert navigator, skilled enough to have been made the captain of a galleon.
It was on one such voyage to Ireland that Columbus saw a boat that had drifted ashore, containing “a man and a woman of extraordinary appearance,” – both dead. Columbus assumed that these flat-faced, alien looking people were Chinese, whose boat had somehow drifted across the Atlantic – an assumption he later used to support his theory of the Indies to the west. In all probability, however, the bodies he saw in that boat were not Chinese at all; more likely, they had come from nearby Finland or perhaps Lapland.