Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean, opening the way for European exploration and colonization of the Americas.
- Christopher Columbus italian name was Cristoforo Colombo. He was a citizen of the Republic of Genoa.
- Between 1492 and 1503, Christopher Columbus completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Americas, all of them under the sponsorship of the Crown of Castile.
- When Columbus "discovered" the Americas, the continent was already inhabited by 90 million people which was a third of the world's population.
- Leif Erikson is regarded as the first European to land in North America, nearly 500 years before Columbus.
- 2200 years ago, Eratosthenes estimated the Earth's circumference using math, without ever leaving Egypt. He was remarkably accurate. Christopher Columbus later studied him.
- Christopher Columbus correctly predicted an eclipse to trick the native inhabitants of Jamaica into giving him food and supplies.
- There's a direct descendant of Christopher
- Columbus alive today. He's a Spanish noble.
- Over 3 million people perished from war, slavery, and the mines in Hispaniola under the rule of Christopher Columbus.
- No one knows what Christopher Columbus looked like. No authentic contemporary portraits of him were found. Most just reconstructed his appearance from written descriptions.
- Christopher Columbus thought that the world was shaped like a woman's breast.
- Machu Picchu was built around 1450 CE, less than 50 years before Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World.
- Towards the end of his life, Christopher Columbus produced a "Book of Prophecies," in which his career as an explorer is interpreted in the light of Christian eschatology and
- of apocalypticism.
- Christopher Columbus brought the first lemon seeds to America.
- Christopher Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery.
- Christopher Columbus thought he saw mermaids in 1493, but from his description, they were probably manatees.
- Christopher Columbus showed a keen interest in the Bible and in Biblical prophecies, and would often quote biblical texts in his letters and logs.
- The last Moorish kingdom in Spain fell in the same year Columbus reached the Americas.
- When Christopher Columbus needed a place to store his loot, he went to the Banco di San Giorgio in Genoa, Italy, the world's first public modern bank.
- Some historians believe that Columbus visited Iceland's Snaefellsnes Peninsula in 1477 and there learned of Viking explorations of the New World.
- Christopher Columbus was not a scholarly man and yet, he learned Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian, and read widely about astronomy, geography, and history.