Preface: Some readers thought I should have ignored the Discovery Channel program on Columbus. Well, for one, we were not sure, and only had suspicions of a "hatchet job", but what if we were wrong, and it was instead a "gem"?

Also, If you are not ever vigilant, and watch to see how Your History and Culture is being represented, how can you be aware to "correct" those inaccuracies?

In that regard the Discovery Channel did not disappoint, and Professor Carolyn Balducci ( U. Michigan) described the program as simplistic, repetitious and veered
toward 'junk science.'

One might enjoy fancifying, or speculating, or want to maintain beliefs because it suits their agenda, but if they are in search of the Truth, then this is a "must read":

"Christopher Columbus: Genius of the Sea" by Paolo Emilio Taviani.

It's only 78 Pages, plus extensive Bibliography, FULLY AVAILABLE on the Web.
No seeking, no ordering, no cost, no even getting out of your chair. Isn't life grand?

Taviani was commissioned by the Italian Ministero Per I Beni Culturali E Ambientali,
National Committee for the Celebrations of The Fifth Century Discovery of America.
The Research, References, and Notes are IMPRESSIVE.

"Christopher Columbus: Genius of the Sea" by Paolo Emilio Taviani
http://muweb.millersville.edu/~columbus/
data/art/TAVIANI4.ART

CONTENTS:
Chapter I: The Myth of Columbus
Chapter II: The Documents
Chapter III:  Columbus's Genoese Birth
Chapter IV:  The Family
Chapter V: Genoa: The Roots of the Character and the Faith of Columbus
Chapter VI: Columbus's Cultural Roots In Genoa
Chapter VII: Columbus As Protagonist of the Great Event

Other good Sources that I selected from the more than 100 Columbus Web Sites on my IA PORTAL that Refute Anti-Columbus Rhetoric can be found at the end.

But take a taste of Chapter I: The Myth of Columbus
From: "Christopher Columbus: Genius of the Sea" by Paolo Emilio Taviani

If the life of Christopher Columbus reads like a novel, an even stranger and more complicated novel has been spun from the debates surrounding his birth.  It is understandable that certain Spanish historians would seek to bestow full credit for the great discovery on Spain by arguing that Columbus was a Spanish citizen.  It is equally understandable that the Castilians and Catalonians---two populations that have been linguistically and culturally divided for centuries--have fought over which of the two had the honor of being the birthplace of Christopher Columbus.

But what wild imaginings could have generated a Greek Columbus, an English Columbus, three French Columbuses, and, as if that were not enough, a Corsican Columbus, a Swiss Columbus, and three Portuguese Columbuses?  For an explanation, we can look only to the immeasurable greatness of Columbus's achievement and to its profound consequences on the course of human history; only to the mythic figure of the Navigator, the first man to unveil the mystery of the New World to the inhabitants of the Old World, only to the amazing story of his life and his voyages.  The glorious myth of Columbus has prompted some minds to hallucinate and some dilettantes to try to appropriate the myth for themselves.

Shakespeare has been treated in much the same fashion.  As with Columbus, his unquestionable greatness, together with his unequaled fame, have generated absurd imaginings about him.  The "mythic" characters in his plays seem raised above their author, who was apparently a simply country gentleman, and instead would seem to be the creations of either a man more elevated and noble in life and thought, or--depending on the case--a person with a more complex psychology: someone like Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Derby or even a woman.

However, no document, no historical data, authorize or even partially justify the tales spun around the birth of Columbus. There is an absurd story of a Greek Columbus, concocted by an English writer toward the end of the last century.  Two hundred years earlier, in 1682, another Englishman came out with the extravagant statement that Columbus had been born in London.  The claim for a Portuguese Columbus emerges every now and then from that country's dilettante historians, and it reappeared during the 1930s with the fantastic thesis that Zarco--the rediscoverer of Porto Santo and Madeira--and Cristobal Colon were one and the same.

And then there are the namesakes, which have given rise totales and legends wherever one finds the surname Columbus. Claims based on namesakes soon appeared in Liguria and in the areas of Piacenza and of Monferrato starting in the sixteenth century.  They appeared outside of Italy in the late seventeenth century, the eighteenth century, and even as late as the nineteenth century.  Thus, in Digne in 1697, a lawyer by the name of Jean Colomb proclaimed himself a descendant of the Navigator Two centuries later, in honor of the fourth centennial of the discovery of the Americas, some heraldic scholars labored hard to trace the origins of the Coullons or of the Colombs of Bordeaux, Bourgogne, and Savoy.  A certain M. Colomb who generously gave refuge to one of the Ruffini exiles in Helvetic territory in 1834 believed with an almost naive sincerity that he himself was a descendant of the great Columbus.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the citizens of Calvi also made their claims on the basis of namesakes.  Calvi was built by the Genoese on the northwestern coast of Corsica in 1268 and populated by Genoese families.  For centuries it served Genoa as a loyal fortress, loyal against foreigners and against the Corsicans themselves: even today "civitas Calvi semper fidelis" is written on the gates of the citadel.  It was loyal to the point that when Pasquale Paoli built another town--Ile Rousse--not far away, he is reported to have exclaimed, "I have built the gallows from which Calvi will hang!"

In Calvi the families were all, or almost all, Genoese. Obviously there were some Columbuses, and nothing forbids the idea that some close or distant relations of the discoverer might have lived there.  But respect for history and for documents should have forbidden the inscription that can still be read today on the plaque of a ruined house: "Ici est ne, en 1441, Christophe Colomb, immortalise par la decouverte du Nouveau Monde, alors que Calvi etait sous la domination genoise: mort A Vallodolid le 20 mai 1500."

If we backtrack a little, we find the first mistake: Columbus died in 1506 not in 1500.  Second mistake: Calvi was not under Genoese domination it was entirely Genoese, as much as were and are Genoa's own districts, such as Pre and Molo, and even more so than Savona and Cogoleto.  Third mistake: Columbus was born around 1451, not in 1441.  Fourth and final mistake: he was not born in Calvi.  Nor does the fact that during the second and third voyages of discovery some of the sailors were from Calvi suffice to give credit to this legend: "Lu dolce lidu s'annanno Colombo dentr'u so nido" [The sweet beaches that cradled Columbus in his nest] (editor's translation).

Not even the Corsicans believe in the legend anymore, nor do the French tourists.  The plaque is broken into three pieces, the walls are in ruins, and the corner of the citadel where the old house stood is visited less and less, except by the lizards, who crawl amidst oily tufts of weeds, dust, and crumbling rock.  This absurd legend merits no further discussion.

However, the thesis that Columbus was Spanish deserves careful criticism.  Some individuals, whose theories have been refuted by the greatest Spanish historians, have attempted to prove that in Genoa during the second half of the fifteenth century, there was indeed a Christoforus Columbus, son of Domenico, a woolen weaver, and grandson of Giovanni da Moconesi, and that this Christoforus Columbus was indeed a seaman.  But this man is not the same as the Cristobal Colon who discovered America.  And where was this Spanish Cristobal Colon born?  In Plasencia, in Estremadura, says one historian; in Tortosa, in Catalonia, says another; and in Pontevedra, in Galicia, says yet another.

Ballesteros Beretta analyzes all of the hypotheses regarding the great navigator's presumed Hispanicism and disproves them with precise arguments in his chapter on Columbus's native land. Most supporters of this thesis are not experts: many are even complete outsiders to the field of history.  For the sake of vanity, or an easy notoriety, or a misguided nationalism, they have voiced risky opinions without bothering to seriously verify their statements.  The various Estremadura hypotheses--in particular, the one proposed by Vicente Paredes--are pure fiction, unworthy of attention except to illustrate the imaginations of their inventors.  Regarding the idea of a Galitian Columbus, Ballesteros notes that once there were plenty of books which adopted this thesis, but today the ardor of its supporters has abated.  The best-known proponent of this thesis is Celso Garcia de la Riega, who in 1892, in honor of the fourth centenary of the discovery, began to produce a series of studies meant to proclaim the admiral's Hispanic, not to mention Galitian, origins.  De la Riega based his argument on documents from Pontevedra, which Manuel Serrano y Sanz and Eladio Oviedo y Arce immediately stated were worthless.

But the "production" of Pontevedra documents continued, igniting a debate on both sides of the Atlantic.  Finally the bishop of Madrid, Leopoldo Eijo y Garay, was called in to settle the dispute.  He was considered a person beyond reproach, partly because he himself was of Galitian origin.  A special committee conducted an accurate scientific and paleographic examination of the documents, resulting in evidence that they had been altered and falsified.  The committee's report stated: "The documents examined were the object of a systematic manipulation, and have no value whatsoever, and they cannot be accepted as the basis or the proof for a serious historical study."  Ballesteros exclaims, "The most solid basis for the Galitian thesis was the documents; when these fell, so did everything else!"

This episode deserved extended coverage not only for the sake of destroying a fiction, but also to duly recognize the seriousness of Spanish historiography, which is that of a great nation whose glories are such and so many, including some concerning the discovery of America, that it need not display false vanities.

Ballesteros engaged in an even deeper scrutiny of the Catalan thesis.  He writes, "If the Galitian thesis was spread by supporters who were foreign to the historical disciplines, the theory of a Catalonian Columbus, by contrast, was maintained by a respectable person, who had great familiarity with historical research, and who had resided in Spain for a number of years: the librarian of the National Library of Lima, Luis Ulloa."  Ulloa began with the assumption that all the Genoese documentation referring to Christopher Columbus has nothing to do with Colon. He found hints of Catalan origins in the admiral's name, in his coat of arms, and in his symbols and signature.  To Ulloa, even the navigator's reminiscences on geography were proof of his Hispano-Catalonian origins.  Ulloa "penetrates the great labyrinth of Columbus court documents to gather arguments in favor of his preconceived theory.  It is not possible to follow him in all of his lucubrations.  His fiery imagination pushes him into a continuous hermeneutics.  He searches and researches, and from a tenuous watermark, which appears through an old map, he constructs a building solid only in appearance for his Juan Colom."

"But what document, what proof," Ballesteros continues, "can be exhibited which affirms that Columbus was Catalonian? Absolutely none.  The Galitian hypothesis at least had the appearance of truth in the beginning, until the manipulation of the Pontevedra documents had been demonstrated.  But with the Catalonian thesis we are faced by a system of clues based essentially on a negative approach, which declares that anything which can prove that the discoverer was Genoese is false."

As a last decisive blow to Ulloa's imaginative and arbitrary construction, I quote Ballesteros's severe concluding judgement:

In the course of the Conference on American Studies held in Hamburg, the pertinacious Peruvian presented his thesis on the discovery of America relying, as always, on suppositions and interpretations of texts.  On that occasion, without entering into the merits of the question, his system of historical elaboration and his method of work were immediately invalidated.  The historian's mission is essentially that of making the past come to life, of resuscitating the fact which has been forgotten in time; but to construct studies, which are only scientific in appearance, based on second-hand third-hand hypotheses, leads not to history but rather to a more or less gratuitous fiction.  This is what Ulloa has done! (editor's translation)

Spanish historians have since abandoned the thesis that Columbus was Spanish, and they all recognize that the discoverer was Genoese.  Like Ballesteros, Manzano continuously calls Columbus genoves, ligur, and extranjero in his works.

Today all Columbus scholars, both his admirers and his detractors, recognize that he was Genoese.  The reader may find along list at his or her disposal in the bibliography at the end of this article.  Here, I anticipate some of the best-known names.

In addition to Ballesteros Beretta and Manzano, the  following historians have recognized that Columbus was Genoese: the Spanish Navarrete, Munoz, Duro, Asensio, Serrano y Sanz, Altolaguirre, Perez de Tudela, Morales Padron, Manuel Alvar, Ciroanescu, Rumeu de Armas, Muro Orejon, Martinez Hidalgo, Emiliano Jos, Demetrio Ramos, Consuelo Varela, Juan Gil, Ballesteros Gaibrois, and Milhou; the French D'Avezac, Roselly deLorgues, Vignaud, Sumien, Charcot, Houben, de la Ronciere, MahnLot, Heers, Mollat, and Braudel; the English Robertson, Johnson,Markham, Brebner, and Bradford; the Belgians Pirenne and Verlinden; the Germans Humboldt, Peschel, Ruge, Streicher, Leithaus, and Breuer; the Swiss Burckhardt; the Russian Magidovic; the Rumanian Goldemberg; the North Americans Irving, Harrisee, Winsor, Dickey, Thacher, Nunn, Morison, Parry, and Boorstin; the Cubans Alvarez Pedroso, Ramirez Corria, Carpentier, and Nunez Jimenez; the Puerto Ricans Aurelio Tio and Alegria; the Colombians Arciniegas and Obregon; the Argentinians Molinari, Levillier, and de Gandia; the Uruguayans Laguarda Trias and Marta Sanguinetti; and the Japanese Aynashiya.

Outside of specialized studies, many authoritative figures in science and in letters have had the occasion to express their, convictions regarding a Genoese Columbus: Leibniz, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Paul Claudel, Churchill. Among Italian Columbus scholars, only a few dilettantes have, interpreted the Genoese question in a broad sense (Cogoleto, Bettola, Cuccaro).  All of the serious scholars, some of whom are, deservedly well known and widely quoted abroad, use unequivocal, documents, of which I shall soon speak, to point to Genoa as the, birthplace of the great discoverer.

Now that you are hooked, proceed to Chapter II:

"Christopher Columbus: Genius of the Sea" by Paolo Emilio Taviani
http://muweb.millersville.edu/~columbus/
data/art/TAVIANI4.ART

Order Sons of Italy in America
Italian Culture and History
Christopher Columbus
http://www.osia.org/public/culture/columbus.asp

***Columbus on Trial: 1492 v. 1992 by Robert Royal
http://muweb.millersville.edu/~columbus/
data/art/ROYAL-02.ART

Full Book: The True Story of Christopher Columbus, Called the Great Admiral
by Elbridge Streeter Brooks
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/
public/BroTrue.html