Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492

by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Book Overview

Demonstrating that Columbus's voyage was a new step in a centuries-old process of European expansion, Fernandez-Armesto provides a stimulating account of the broadening of Europe's physical and mental horizons in the Middle Ages. He shows how the techniques and institutions of medieval colonial expansion that were applied to the New World made long-term conquest and settlement possible.

A brief introduction analyzes the problems that face...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812214129
• ISBN13: 9780812214123
• Release Date: June 1987
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Columbus as a logical outcome

It is hard to use, in the same sentence, logic and a man who believed both in the basic sphericity of the earth and the existence of the Earthly Paradise. But, all hero-villain dichotomies aside, we shall always be confronted with the fact that it was Columbus who started the inexorable process that produced America as we know it, to the exclusion of all who may have preceded him to these shores.I doubt seriously that, even today, you can find any book in English containing as much of the process (speaking historically) that produced Columbus. The patchwork of overlapping interests that constituted the Medieval and Renaissance Mediterranean has to be one of the truly difficult places to begin on the globe. Just when you think Venice has emerged safely ahead of Genoa, and the Portuguese have shut the gate on Spain, then everything changes. Too bad the expression "sea change" wasn't yet invented when this book was written.The African leg of the process has had some coverage, but not any more competently than here. I have some reservations about the claim that gold was the Italian merchants' only motive for trading in North Africa. And this claim is somewhat mitigated by the author's own observation that the attraction of the Canaries was a certain dyestuff easily obtained there. His explanation of the crucial role of the Canaries, while Morisonesque, certainly explains much. A chronological list of major steps would have been helpful. This book is, however, a "keeper," and will be for some time to come.