His name is different in at least three languages. In Italian he is called Cristoforo Colombo, in Spanish he is Cristobal Colón, and in English he is Christoper Columbus.
So which is his real name? Is it the Italian, Spanish, or English version?
I don’t think either is more real than someone being called Wilhelm Schmidt or William Smith. It’s just referenced to wherever you’re at.
Being from Genoa, Italy, his name would be Christoforo Colombo.
Well, you could translate my name into other languages, I’d still consider my given name my real one. Columbus was Italian, so I’d suspect he preferred Cristoforo Colombo.
Cristoforo, Supplico il suo perdono.
So was Colombo his birth name? I ask because, from what I recall, on his tombstone he is referred to as Cristobal Colón. Also, from genealogical research, I have found that his descendants kept the name Colón.
Columbus was born a Genoan but became a Spaniard by naturalization. I think by his later years Columbus pretty much considered himself a Spaniard. This is not to say he renounced being Italian. Its interesting that Italians, Spaniards and many Latin Americans more or less view him as one of their “own” (at least until recent years he was a major hero in these places as well). For instance in most of Latin America (except Brazil) October 12th is “Dia de la Raza” .
He was born a Colombo and died a Colón. It’s not too different in principle from an immigrant from Austria changing his name from Gerhard Braun to Jerry Brown at Ellis Island.
Was Albert Einstein Swiss or American? Was T.S. Eliot American or British? I suppose some would go by birth and upbringing and others by the choices they made as adults…the same can be said Columbus.
Columbus is actually the Latin version of his name not the English one. In the fifteenth century, Latin was considered the international language.
I had a history professor as an undergrad who said that there is evidence Colombus wasn’t a native of Italy, but rather was born in the Balearic Islands and settled in Genoa. I’ve never found any further reference to this, has anyone on the board heard of this view?
UnuMondo
Which tombstone? The fake one in Spain, or the real oine in the Dominican Republic?
The one in the Dominican Republic.
I guess I should have done a search first. toadspittle’s post is eerily similar.
And as has been stated in that thread and this one, names were more fluid back then. Caterina of Aragon signed her name Katherine after she married an Englishman. It’s just the way things were done.
It seems as if people, even if they were more “tribal,” were not so wrapped up in their names as a symbol of their identity back then. Different suffixes and pronounciations weren’t that much of a change from different spellings, such as the variables someone like Shakespeare or Bacon used.
This page is devoted to an argument for that theory. Interesting how so many Ibizan records seem to have gone missing…
So you have the answer to the enigma? Because nobody else in the world knows for sure where his remains may be. Last I heard late 2002 they were planning of doing some dna testing to try to determine the truth. Has it been done and I missed the results?
After reading a bit more about where Columbus might be buried I see it is much more complex than I thought. His remains have been moved many times and in a number of those nobody is sure they got the right ones. There is a fairly good chance the remains are not in either the Dominican Republic or Seville. Briefly:
Columbus died in 1503 in Valladolid, Spain and was buried there. A few years later (the date is not clear) his remains were taken to a monastery in Seville but the precise location within the monastery isn’t clear either. A few years later, again, date not clear, the remains were taken to Santo Domingo and again the exact location is not clear. His brother and son and gransonns were also buried in the same church. In 1795 when the French took over, the remains were shipped to Cuba to be buried in Havana. In 1877 Some workers digging in Santo Domingo say they found the remains so it is not clear if the ones shipped to Cuba were mistaken, maybe being that of his son Diego but others say it is the other way around. In 1898 with the independence of Cuba the remains from havana were moved back to Sevilla. Seeing how uncertain every move was there is a very good chance his remains are somewhere else than the two sites that claim to have them. There has been talk of doing DNA tests to determine which are the right remains.
http://www.el-nacional.com/revistas/todoendomingo/todo15/insolito.asp
http://www.larevista.com.mx/ed674/info8.htm
Whoa. And I thought the guy got around when he was alive!
I wonder if Clifford Irving and the guy he wrote Fake! about had anything to do with that? :eek:
For the record, like most 15th Century men, he considered his “real” name to be the Latinization of his original: Christophorus Columbus. The variations mentioned above are the original (Ligurian dialect) Italian, the modern Spanish (early modern Spanish is slightly different and more closely resembles the Latin and Italian, but I don’t have a reference handy to quote it), and the English – which, you’ll note, merely drops the -us from the first name of the Latin version.
Well, he is still on the move. The remains in Sevilla were disinterred today for DNA testing. The news said this will settle for once and for all whether those remains are the true ones and also his place of birth. I have no idea how you get the place of birth from DNA. BTW, his remains are in an urn a bit larger than a shoe box. I had no idea the guy was so short.
Well, you could compare the DNA with that from families whose history goes back a long way in Genoa or the Balearic Islands, say. There could be some genetic differences.