Christopher Columbus was born on October 30, 1451 in the Italian port city of Genoa, on the coast of the Ligurian Sea. His Italian name was Cristoforo Colombo, while Cristobal Colon was Spanish and Christovao Colom was his Portuguese name. He is generally referred to as Christopher Columbus, his English name. He was a Genoese by origin. He was the eldest of five children. His father was Domenico Colombo, a wool weaver who was also involved in the local politics, and his mother was Suzanna Fontanarossa who was the daughter of a wool weaver herself.  They were five siblings in all. Christopher was the eldest and had three younger brothers – Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino, Giacomo, and a sister, Bianchinetta.

His family moved to the nearby port city of Savona, to the west of Genoa, in 1470. He joined his father’s business of wool processing and selling at a very young age, though he did not find the job as exciting as his young and imaginative mind would have desired, and he would dream of adventurous sea voyages and fantastic foreign lands. These were the factors for which he developed an interest and started to learn cartography.

Christopher got along especially well with his brother, Bartolomeo, with whom he had more than one thing in common. The brothers shared a passion for cartography, a skill for which they studied together, and they would also collaborate later in the trade of selling books. By the time that he had reached manhood, he was already literate, an accomplishment possible because of the primary lessons recieved from parish priests.

During an age when young men were generally expected to follow their father's trade, which for young Christopher would be the wool trade; it was nevertheless not uncommon for the young lads of Savona, a major port city, to start their careers as seafarers. But Christopher had started his apprenticeship for becoming a seaman even before his family moved to Savona. At the age of 14, he had already assumed the role of messenger, and ship's boy.

On August 13, 1476, a Genoese commercial expedition of five ships bound for England gave Columbus his first opportunity to leave the familiar Mediterranean Sea and sail into the unknown waters of the Atlantic Ocean. But it turned out to be an inauspicious beginning for a man who would become Admiral of the Ocean Seas. Having passed through the Straits of Gibraltar without incident, the entire fleet came under attack by French privateers off the Cape of St. Vincent. Both sides lost ships; Columbus, one of the unfortunate ones whose ship was burned, had no escape other than to swim to shore. That he survived, his son would later boast, was "because he was a prodigious swimmer." Six miles from shore, he made it to land by clinging to wreckage. After regaining his strength in the Port of Lagos, without money or position, Columbus made his way to Lisbon’s large Genoese community of merchants and shipbuilders. He was twenty-five years old.

By 1477 Columbus resided in Lisbon. To someone born and raised in a Mediterranean sea port, his new home must have seemed magical, alive with anticipation. Sitting at the mouth of the Tagus River, Lisbon’s rhythm was that of the crashing ocean at its doorstep. Thrusting into the Atlantic, facing water on two sides, Portugal had become a center for maritime activity. Since the time of Prince Henry the Navigator’s explorations down the coast of Africa, Lisbon was a haven for explorers, adventurers, entrepreneurs, merchants and any others who saw their fortunes tied to the trade winds and ocean currents. Soon Columbus’ brother Bartolomeo would be in Lisbon, as well, working as a mapmaker and studying geography. At times, the brothers worked side-by-side as draftsmen in the map-making business and as book collectors. But he soon realized that trade as a map-maker was not a lucrative position, so he decided to go back to sea and in 1478, he gained more Atlantic experience by sailing to Madeira to purchase sugar commissioned as an agent for Italian merchants. A lawsuit stemming from this voyage was what forced him to return to Genoa in 1479 to testify. Columbus once again returned to Lisbon and resumed his chartmaking duties for his brother. In his spare time he would frequent sailors' haunts, located in the sizeable Genovese colony in Lisbon, to hear their tales of the high seas. The port of Lisbon was the merchandise market of Europe at that time. Portuguese ships carried a flourishing trade between Lisbon and England, Ireland, Iceland, Madeira, the Azores and Africa. Ships from every country in Europe would make their stop there to unload goods and take on supplies.

Not far from Columbus' brother's chartmaking shop was a convent where the daughters of Portuguese nobility were schooled, and where young men would go courting. It was in the convent's chapel that Columbus met his future wife, Dona Felipa Perestrello y Moniz, the daughter of Isabel Moniz and deceased Bartolomeo Perestrello. Perestrello had been a seagoing man, and was appointed hereditary governor of Porto Santo, a small island 30 miles northeast of Madeira, by Prince Henry. Both sides of Felipa's family were illustrious, her grandfather on her mother's side was one of the richest seigniories of the Algarve and her father descended from the noble Italian Pelestrellos of Piacenza (Emilia Romagna - Italy's food valley). Bartolomeo Perestrello had died in 1457 and his wife and daughter moved from Porto Santo to Lisbon where Felipa met Columbus. After their marriage, Columbus and his wife continued to live in Lisbon. His marriage was one that was important to him for two reasons: one was that it was a marriage of love, Felipa and Christopher were deeply in love with each other. The second one was that by virtue of his marriage, Columbus acquired Portuguese citizenship and, therefore, the right to trade in all Portuguese overseas possessions. He sailed the north and south Atlantic from Iceland to Africa, learned the currents, travelled various routes and eventually integrated their lessons into a scheme for re-establishing direct trade with Asia by sailing west.

Eventually, Columbus, his wife and mother-in-law shifted their residence to Porto Santo in the Madeira islands, to live with Dona Felipa's brother who had inherited his father's governorship. While in Porto Santo, Columbus heard many seafaring stories such as that of the pilot who saw, far west of Cape St. Vincent, a strange piece of wood that had not been carved by iron and that had been blown by the west wind from unknown islands across the ocean and of mariners venturing beyond the Azores and Canaries, and had seen islands on the horizon.

It can be said that Columbus was one husband who seemed to have had more reason than most to bless his mother-in-law. While on Porto Santo, Dona Isabel recognized her son-in-law's restless interest in everything about oceanic voyaging and distant lands. It is said that she "gave him the journals and sea charts left by her husband," and a result Columbus's passion was "still more inflamed." It is also believed that it was the papers of Bartolomeo Perestrello, who had sailed for Prince Henry, and the information from Portuguese seamen that fixed Columbus' mind on the westward ocean crossing.

While on Porto Santo, he enjoyed spending evenings on the beach with Felipa. Columbus had a fine tenor voice and loved singing the mournful fados (a Portuguese song typically accompanied by guitar). His first son, Diego was probably born on the island in 1480. Unfortunately, his wife, Felipa, succumbed to an illness soon after the birth of her son.

Europe in the Days of Columbus

During the fifteenth century, there were immense conflicts between the Christians and the Muslims. The city of Constantinople (today known as Istanbul, Turkey) was the capital of the orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire and was conquered by the Muslim Ottoman Turks. It was a major trade centre between Europe and Asia. The European merchants bought Asian goods through Muslims, but did not wish to do so because of their conflicts with them. Also, the European princes and kings realized that, the country that discovered the new route to Asia first would be the one to become wealthy in a very short time by monopolizing trade with the Asians. These two major factors: The desire to see the fall of Constantinople and establish a trading route with Asians, encouraged the navigators to explore a new sea-route.

The commission investigated all material set forth by Columbus. Even educated persons in those days nurtured the belief that the Earth’s Surface was mostly flat. It was Portugal which was the first nation to discover the new sea-route. The Portuguese had conquered the northern African region and the Muslim commercial centre of Ceuta on the Strait of Gibraltar. They had also begun exploring the western coast of Africa and were hoping to find a route to Asia. It was in this scenario of extensive discoveries that Christopher Columbus entered this world.