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| Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea |
And there is more. Columbus’s writings mention a voyage to Chios. Certain vegetation he saw in the Caribbean islands reminded him of the mastic trees of Chios. And on his first voyage of discovery, didn’t he keep a secret log (in Greek, as some say) to keep his fearful crews from knowing exactly how far away from home they’d actually sailed?
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| Columbus's Cipher |
Dare we think it? Was Christopher Columbus a Greek from Chios?
Sadly, there’s not a shred of documentary proof that Columbus was from Chios. And just like the Chiotes, who rely on legend and point to the indigenous Kolomvos family, people in at least five Italian cities (Genoa, Cuccaro, Cogoleto, Savona, and Piacenza) also point to long-established Colombo families as proof of Columbus’s birthplace. Going the Chiotes one better, they’ll credulously show you not only the house where Columbus was born, but also the graves of his ancestors.
The Greeks and the Italians are both mistaken. Columbus never used the surname Kolomvos or its Italian or Latin variants, Colombo and Columbus. In fact, no record survives (apart from the cipher) of how Columbus referred to himself. Castilian records of the 1480s and 1490s name him as Xpoval de Colomo, Cristóval Colomo, and Cristóbal Colón. Some consider these surnames to be castilianizations of his proper (possibly Catalan) surname: Colom.
Nor has a secret voyage log ever been found, let alone a Greek one. And Spyros Cateras’s book simply doesn’t live up to its cocksure title. Cateras's so-called proof was a metallic box once kept somewhere on Chios. The box supposedly contained a record of Prince Nikolaos Ypshilantis, said to have been the real Columbus according to local legend. But the box and its telltale contents disappeared after the massacre of 1822. Such is the quality of Cateras's evidence.
And then there are the problematical 15th century Genoese legal documents. They came to light during the Columbus quadricentennial and refer to a lanaiolo (a person in the wool business) named Cristoforo Colombo and his brothers Bartolomeo and Giacomo, residents of Genoa and nearby towns. These contemporaneous records, unquestionably genuine, support the traditional view, which is that this Genoese wool merchant is the same person who in 1492 “discovered” America and became the famous Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
But even if Columbus wasn’t from Chios and was in fact from Genoa or its neighborhood, isn’t it still possible that he had a Greek connection? Xio and Χρō-FERENS still nag. So does Columbus’s ignorance of Italian. And these aren't the only things that don't fit comfortably with the idea of a Genoese lanaiolo.
Considering, for instance, the rigid social stratification of his time, how could a Genoese wool merchant become a Castilian admiral, and acquire as thorough an education as Columbus did, and become an accomplished seaman, and marry a noble Portuguese woman, and acquire royal patrons, and be at such apparent ease with kings and princes of every stripe? After all, King João II of Portugal addressed Columbus in a letter of 1488 as “noso especial amigo” (our special friend); and when Columbus went to kiss the Spanish sovereigns’ hands on his return from the Caribbean in 1493, they stood up -- a most unusual concession to a common merchant. These are only a few of the many well known and perplexing anomalies of the Columbus biography.
Columbus was notoriously reticent about his family background and place of birth. Even his son and first biographer, Fernando (1488-1539), knew few details about his father’s origins. The problem has plagued Columbus scholars for centuries.
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| Seraphim G. Canoutas (1874-1944) [photo courtesy of The National Herald] |
The book aggressively challenged the traditional view that the Genoese wool merchant and the world-famous Admiral were the same person. And beyond declaring who Columbus was not, Canoutas plausibly argued that Columbus was indeed a high-born Greek. Canoutas died the year after publication, and his intriguing study went out of print. Now it is all but forgotten.Canoutas himself has also undeservedly faded from memory. At the beginning of the 20th century, he was a pre-eminent leader in Greek American society and letters. A prolific writer, beginning in 1908 he published the annual Greek American Guide and Business Directory, full of useful information for new immigrants, including Greek translations of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Naturalization Act. He was the source of much of the information in Thomas Burgess’s Greeks in America (1913), the first serious study of Greek ethnicity in American society. Much of Canoutas's information was gathered in a two-year canvass (1909-1910) of Greek communities in every state save Arizona and New Mexico. His monograph on Columbus was just one of his many books, which included his own history of Hellenism in America (1918). He also published two monthly newspapers and a magazine and wrote a column for a Greek American newspaper. Toward the end of his life, he collaborated with two other authors on a text eventually published in book form as A History of the Greeks in the Americas: 1492-1938 (2002).
Born among the crags of Evrytania in tiny Nostimon, Canoutas walked three miles over a mountain twice each day for four years to attend elementary school in equally obscure Voutyron. Being the best pupil, arrangements were made to continue his education in Proussos, where he boarded in the famous monastery. Again finishing first, he walked for two days to Agrinion and continued his education at the gymnasion there and later in Lamia. He went on to law school at the University of Athens, the first son of Evrytanian farmers ever to attend. After graduation, he practiced law in Athens and Constantinople for six years.
Reading of Franklin, Lincoln, and other self-made Americans, the U.S. became irresistible. Arriving in 1905, Canoutas learned English and began publishing his useful books for Greek immigrants. After becoming a naturalized citizen (1911), serving as Greece's vice-consul for the southern states (based in Nashville), and acquiring a U.S. law degree (1912), he settled in Boston, was admitted to the bar, and began his U.S. law practice, which he later transferred to New York City. One of his bar sponsors testified to the “dignity and courtesy of his bearing and manners.” He struck another as “an unusually intelligent man” and “the kind of man in whose statements I should place confidence.” This sponsor also mentioned Canoutas’s “rather remarkable command of English.”
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| Fernando Colon (1488-1539) |
“As concerning the cause of the Admiral’s coming into Spain, and his being addicted to sea affairs, the occasion of it was a famous man of his name and family, called Colon, renowned upon the sea, on account of the fleet he commanded against infidels . . .. This man was called Colon the Younger, to distinguish him from another who was a great seaman before him. . . . [T]he Admiral sailed with the aforesaid Colon the Younger . . . a long time . . ..”
Most scholars rejected these statements (and still do) as the pretentious fibs of a wool merchant trying to obscure his lowly station. But Canoutas pointed out that Columbus had no reason to tell lies that could have been refuted easily during his lifetime. More than that, Canoutas recognized that if Columbus’s claims were true, they explained the host of anomalies that either had to be ignored or attributed to error or falsehood in order for the wool merchant to be the same person as the Admiral.
The key to the puzzle, argued Canoutas, was in the identity of “Colon the Younger,” whom Fernando’s biography did not identify, probably because Fernando did not know who he was. His identity remained a mystery for the next 350 years, with scholars and biographers either just repeating (without further elaboration) the story of Columbus’s claim of kinship with Colon the Younger or rejecting it as another one of Columbus’s fables.
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| Henry Harrisse (1829-1910) |
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| Guillaume de Casenove's "Coullon" signature from a French document of 1481 |
Harrisse did not definitively identify the younger corsair. But he speculated that he came to be known as "Colon the Younger" not because the two men were related, but because the two men were regular companions at sea. Harrisse also discovered that the younger Colon was sometimes called Giorgio Griego, or Grecus, or Graecus.
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| Alberto Francesco Salvagnini (1867-1947) |
Finally, in 1905 another highly respected Columbus scholar, Henry Vignaud, after reviewing all the documents examined by Salvagnini, proved beyond any doubt that Colon the Younger was none other than Georges Paléologue de Bissipat, also called Georges le Grec. He proved that this man was an expatriate Byzantine prince related to the imperial Palaiologos family, and that he held a high rank in the French navy, being the principal lieutenant of vice-admiral Guillaume de Casenove. Vignaud’s opinion on these points, said Canoutas, was accepted by almost all subsequent Columbus scholars.
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| Henry Vignaud (1830-1922) |
The Dishypatoi were among the most illustrious Byzantine families, recorded as far back as the 9th century. From the 11th through the 15th centuries, the name appears again and again, often attached to prominent ecclesiastics. In the early 15th century, Alexis Dishypatos was sent by emperor Manuel II Palaiologos as special ambassador to France to secure financial aid. John Dishypatos, an officer of the imperial court, was twice sent by the emperor John VIII Palaiologos as ambassador to the Council of Basel and to the Papal court to negotiate in matters concerning the union of the Greek and Latin churches. In 1434, the emperor sent two other Dishypatos brothers, Emanuel and George (not to be confused with Colon the Younger), on another mission to the Pope. Somewhat later, this same George was dispatched to the Morea to reconcile the emperor’s quarreling brothers, Thomas and Demetrios Palaiologos. So we can see, said Canoutas, that for centuries the Dishypatoi were great personages -- ecclesiastics, officers of the imperial court, diplomats -- and enjoyed the full confidence of the Byzantine emperors, who employed them on missions involving the most vital interests of the state and the church.
On his mother’s side, Colon the Younger was related to the imperial Palaiologos and Laskaris families and, following the custom of the time, used both surnames. Canoutas observed that between these two families there were at least five famous admirals, perhaps the ones to whom Columbus alluded when claiming he was not the first admiral in his family.
Canoutas then pointed out certain other details about the Palaiologos and Laskaris families that shed more light on Dishypatos and, hence, his putative kinsman Columbus. For example, the House of Palaiologos was closely connected by blood or marriage to many of the ruling families of Italy, including those of Genoa and nearby Montferrat. All the marquises of Montferrat were Palaiologoi, he pointed out, and one of them was invited in 1409 to take charge of the government of Genoa. Such connections, he suggested, may explain why Columbus was thought to be Genoese or Ligurian.
He went further and proposed that if Columbus, as he claimed, went to sea at age fourteen and had spent forty years at sea by 1500 plus another seven years at the Spanish court, then he must have been born around 1438-1439, and he must have gone to sea around 1453. This is when Canoutas thought Columbus began sailing with his famous kinsman, Colon the Younger.
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| A de Bissipat family tombstone (Beauvais) |
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| The château de Troissereux (Beauvais), one of Georges de Bissipat's French estates |
The crescent alludes to Islam. According to recent scholarship, Dishypatos’s first cousin, known in the records only as Hüseyn, was an ambassador and intelligence agent of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (1447-1512), the son of Mehmet II (1432-1481), the Islamic conqueror of Byzantium. In Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century (2011), Christine Isom-Verhaaren, an instructor of Middle East History at Benedictine University (Lisle, Ill.), cites a 1486 letter of French King Charles VIII granting Hüseyn safe passage to France as Bayezid’s ambassador. Greek was Hüseyn’s native tongue, she says, and he had useful connections with Christians in the West, not least of whom was his first cousin Georges de Bissipat, by then one of Charles VIII’s most trusted advisors.
As Canoutas said, if we accept that Columbus was telling the truth when he claimed to have sailed for many years with his noble kinsman Colon the Younger, then “all the incidents of his complex life, all his lofty aspirations, all his talents and accomplishments, and all his peculiar characteristics, which hitherto seemed inexplicable, will be readily explained. It will be easy for anyone to see how he had acquired his education, his religious mysticism, his exquisite manners, his daring courage and, above all, his preparation in seamanship; also how he was able to make all the voyages he claimed . . . ; and how he succeeded in commanding the respect of several kings and princes and of so many other great personages.” Likewise, Columbus’s claim of kinship with Colon the Younger explained Columbus’s noble marriage and many other puzzling anomalies of his life. In other words, if the claim were true, then Columbus could indeed have been a Byzantine nobleman, or at least related to one.
But what about the Genoese legal documents? Canoutas addressed them at length, ultimately dismissing them as irrelevant. He convincingly showed that they are irreconcilable with other genuine sources and cannot possibly describe the same person as the Admiral.
In the end, however, Canoutas’s case rests entirely on Columbus’s claim of kinship with Dishypatos, for which there is only one source: Fernando’s biography. If the kinship connection fails, Canoutas’s theory falls completely apart.
And even if the connection is sound, it does not necessarily mean that Columbus was Greek. He may have had Greek relatives, but given the fluidity of the times he may not have lived as a Greek in a Greek city or holding. And while Canoutas gave us persuasive circumstantial reasons to accept that Columbus was related to Dishypatos, what was the relationship? Was it on his father’s side or his mother’s? Was it by blood or marriage? And we still do not know who Columbus’s parents were or where he was born.
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One reason why Canoutas's thesis is practically unknown is that he was robbed of the chance to have his book published by the Columbia University Press. |
| Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947) |
Proffitt and others at the press did not share the university president's enthusiasm and sniffed at a book by a Greek claiming Columbus was Greek. Without plausible cover, however, they could not simply ignore Butler's initiative. Their solution was to by-pass the CUP's publication committee and solicit an opinion from an outside reviewer.
Eugene H. Byrne, a University of Wisconsin specialist in medieval commerce with extensive experience in the archives of Genoa and Marseilles, delivered the opinion they sought. Giving Canoutas's manuscript just a single day's consideration, and without addressing any of Canoutas's facts or arguments, Byrne branded him a "crackpot" and dismissed the book as "an illogical, uncontrolled masterpiece of nonsense." Byrne's one-page rant summarily killed any hope of publication by the CUP.
Proffitt's ensuing rejection letter (falsely issued in the name of the publication committee) dissembled about the over-burden of existing publishing commitments and cited the committee's (non-existent) decision to curtail Canoutas's book along with numerous others. Ignorant of the CUP's game, Canoutas's champion (Greece's consul-general in New York, Nicholas J. Lely) pressed Proffitt for details about the publication committee's reasons for rejection. After all, Lely urged, the Macmillan publishing house had recommended the book for publication by an academic press; and several scholars were favorably impressed. (Proffit independently knew that Clarence Manning, a Columbia University slavicist, had seen the manuscript the previous winter and was "very favorably impressed.")
Proffitt's short response to Lely merely embellished his earlier fabrications. The publication committee had considered Lely's request, he fibbed, but could not break a "long-standing rule" that prohibited the release of the requested details.
Overall, the CUP correspondence smacks of professional arrogance seasoned with a good dose of ethnic prejudice. Days before actually seeing Canoutas's manuscript, Byrne flippantly pre-judged it: "This Columbus question bobs up eternally, and I am naturally suspicious of a book by a Greek contending that Christopher was also a Greek. He was once supposed to have sailed past Ireland on a voyage to Iceland, but so far as I know no one has yet claimed he was an Irishman." Starting from such bias, it was short work for the professional historian to condemn Canoutas's bulky manuscript as the misguided ramblings of an amateur, a foreigner no less.
With help from the Greek American newspaper Atlantis, Canoutas privately published his book the following year (1943) through the St. Marks Press, a New York job printer. When judged without prejudice, the book fared well. William Jerome Wilson, an expert cataloguer of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, reviewing the book for the Hispanic American Historical Review (1945), concluded that it “presents a case which students of the vexed ‘Columbus question’ must consider with the utmost care."
[Update (5/12/16): Henri Grégoire, the renowned byzantinist and Canoutas's friend, unfavorably reviewed Canoutas's book in the journal Byzantion (1945). Essentially, he faulted Canoutas for ignoring the testimony of Columbus's contemporary, the Genoese chronicler Antonio Gallo, who was among the first to say that, before achieving fame as a Castilian admiral, Columbus had been a Genoese wool merchant. In fact, Canoutas addressed Gallo's evidence at length and, in my view, persuasively refuted it.]
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The professional's disdain for the amateur continues. Earlier this year I approached Thierry Ganchou with questions about Canoutas's theory. Ganchou is a French historian whose research interests include the convergence of Byzantium and the West. My overture elicited a scathing reply. I must "be very stupid and/or very rich," he said, to waste my time with the Dishypatos-Columbus relationship, which any "serious scholar" knows is "completely irrelevant." Picking on my presumed incompetence to read 15th century documents, he admonished me not to join "this long cohort of pseudo-historians with a cracked brain who are writing every day so many stupid and illiterate inventions about Columbus."
Ganchou's excoriation was just like Byrne's in 1942. They both peremptorily condemned Canoutas's thesis without addressing -- let alone challenging -- a single fact or argument.
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As far as I can tell, after Wilson's and Grégoire's 1945 book reviews the only non-Greek scholar to have addressed Canoutas's theory directly is Charles J. Merrill, formerly a professor of foreign languages at Mount Saint Mary's University (Emmitsburg, Md.). In Colom of Catalonia: Origins of Christopher Columbus Revealed (2008), Merrill posited the Admiral's noble Catalonian origins. To Merrill's credit, before presenting the Catalonian case he reviewed the other major claims (both traditional and non-traditional) for Columbus's origins.
Merrill dispensed with Canoutas by observing (correctly) that Canoutas's thesis hangs on the assertion (in Fernando's biography) of Columbus's kinship with Colon the Younger and on Colon the Younger's being the same person as Dishypatos. Canoutas's error, Merrill contended, was to overlook evidence of the Admiral's kinship with the elder Colon (Guillaume de Casenove), whose roots were in Catalonia. Because there is no comparable written evidence of the Admiral's kinship with Colon the Younger, Merrill lumped Canoutas with others whose arguments were driven by ethnic partisanship rather than hard proof. As for the portions of Fernando's biography on which Canoutas relied, Merrill deemed them to have been doctored to cover up Columbus's true Aragonese/Catalan roots, which (for reasons too complex to summarize here) were politically embarrassing for his sponsor, King Ferdinand of Aragon, who required Columbus to assume an ambiguous (vaguely Genoese) heritage, a ruse Columbus is said to have played along with for self-serving reasons.
Merrill's thesis, while complex, is well argued and has the advantage of apparent (if only partial) support from 15th century documents. By contrast, there is no denying that Canoutas's thesis lacks documentary corroboration. The only evidence for Columbus's kinship with Colon the Younger (Dishypatos) is Fernando's biographical hearsay.
Even so, Merrill did not disprove Canoutas's theory. He merely offered a plausible alternative one.
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For traditionalists, the premises underlying Canoutas's and Merrill's competing theories -- Columbus's kinship with one or the other of the two seagoing Colons -- are equally anathema. Even worse for Canoutas's theory, it invites the Academy's reflexive scorn for ideas that originate from outside the walls (witness the intemperate recoil by Byrne and Ganchou). But until the claim of kinship with Dishypatos is definitively disproved, any judgment about Canoutas's thesis -- indeed, any judgment about Columbus's origins -- that fails to address the kinship claim head-on is dubious a priori. Merrill's willingness to confront the claim is evidence of his intellectual candor.
Seraphim Canoutas blazed an intriguing new path for exploring the "vexed" Columbus question. His thesis is plausible and needs to be better known and further developed. Picking up where Canoutas left off, others may someday discover the true nature of Columbus’s Greek connection.
This post originated in an address I gave to the Hellenic Society "Prometheas" in Bethesda, Maryland, on October 3, 2008 (http://www.prometheas.org/Events_flyers/Christopher_Columbus.pdf), portions of which have since appeared on the internet without authorization or attribution. With my permission, portions of this post were published in The National Herald (Oct. 12-18, 2013).
