Christopher Columbus’s Letter to Raphael Sanxis on the Discovery of America (1493)
Context
Columbus wrote his letter in the context of an age of European world exploration. In the fifteenth century the region around the Mediterranean Sea was dominated by great maritime powers, including Spain, Portugal, and Italian cities such as Venice, Naples, and Genoa. Rulers and merchants were interested in establishing trade routes, in large part because goods could be moved more quickly and efficiently along sea routes than by land, where roads were uncertain and rivers and mountains posed obstacles. Particularly nettlesome to Europeans was the fall of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, Turkey) to the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. Constantinople had been the center of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire and an important trade link between Europe and Asia for centuries, but the Islamic Ottomans had closed it. Merchants in Europe could still buy products from Asia in such places as Egypt, but many wanted to cut out the middleman and find a way to...
