Christopher Columbus, the Crusades, and the End of the World

Christopher Columbus, the Crusades, and the End of the World | Vincent Ryan | Catholic World Report

A review of Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem.

Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem by Carol Delaney
Free Press: New York, 2012
319 pp, paperback, $16.00

Another Columbus Day is upon us and while the protests are not as sizeable or virulent as they were back in the 1990s, the day has certainly become less of a celebration of Christopher Columbus and more of a forum for castigating the Italian mariner and lamenting the intrusion of European civilization in the western hemisphere. Some states, such as Nevada and Hawaii, do not recognize the holiday. And Berkeley, California some years back indulged in its propensity for Orwellian newspeak, rechristening the holiday as Indigenous People’s Day.[1] While ignoring or renaming a holiday is one reflection of the modern Columbus backlash, more damning are the charges that he perpetrated genocide in the Americas.

Carol Delaney believes Columbus has been unfairly characterized by his critics and attempts to set the record straight in Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. The primary error of many modern assessments is mistaking the consequences of his undertakings for his motivations. And according to Delaney that central motivation, as her title suggests, was the liberation of Jerusalem from Muslim control.

While many might not be aware of this, Columbus was very open about his aspiration that the wealth secured from his new route to Asia might help fund a new crusade to regain the holy city. For example, during his first voyage to the western hemisphere, Columbus recorded in his diary that he hope the Spanish Crown would “spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem.”[2] But there was also a strong apocalyptic element to this envisioned campaign, for Columbus believed that the conquest of Jerusalem would usher in the last age. At times Delaney gives the impression that she is the first person to fully appreciate the eschatalogical dimension of his worldview, but there is little that is innovative in her focus on this aspect. Many modern Columbus scholars have readily noted the influence of apocalypticism on the Italian mariner. In his 1991 biography, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto especially emphasized the millenarian ideas that shaped Columbus’s thinking. Nonetheless, while this focus might not be groundbreaking, it does underscore her aim of more properly contextualizing the controversial explorer.

Though Columbus was born in 1451, Delaney’s recently published book begins by examining the impact of an event that occurred two years later: the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The choice is a smart one, for the rising power of the Ottoman Empire was a key catalyst in European endeavors to broaden their own horizons – especially into the Atlantic – during the fifteenth century. While rightly situating the Ottoman-Europe rivalry in the 1400s within the larger history of Muslim-Christian conflict, the author’s synopsis of the Crusades is rather simplistic.[3] Her discussion in the second chapter of the growing influence of apocalypticism during the Middle Ages is even more problematic. It certainly had nothing to do with the resolution of the Great Western Schism and her claim that most medieval Christians had an apocalyptic outlook is a ridiculous overstatement.

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[Charles E Flynn]

Celebrating Columbus, Brave and Bright, by Charles C. W. Cooke.