Let us pass from records by Columbus to those about him. We owe to an ancient custom of Italy that so much has been preserved, to throw in the aggregate no small amount of light on the domestic life of the family in which Columbus was the oldest born. During the fourteen years in which his father lived at Savona, every little business act and legal transaction was attested before notaries, whose records have been preserved filed in filzas in the archives of the town.
These filzas were simply a file of documents tied together by a string passed through each, and a filza generally embraced a year's accumulation. The photographic facsimile which Harrisse gives in his Columbus and the Bank of Saint George, of the letter of Columbus preserved by the bank, shows how the sheet was folded once lengthwise, and then the hole was made midway in each fold.
We learn in this way that, as early as 1470 and later, Columbus stood security for his father. We find him in 1472 the witness of another's will. As under the Justinian procedure the notary's declaration sufficed, such documents in Italy are not rendered additionally interesting by the autograph of the witness, as they would be in England. This notarial resource is no new discovery. As early as 1602, thirteen documents drawn from similar depositaries were printed at Genoa, in some annotations by Giulio Salinerio upon Cornelius Tacitus. Other similar papers were discovered by the archivists of Savona, Gian Tommaso and Giambattista Belloro, in 1810 (reprinted, 1821) and 1839 respectively, and proving the general correctness of the earlier accounts of Columbus's younger days given in Gallo, Senarega, and Giustiniani. It is to be regretted that the original entries of some of these notarial acts are not now to be found, but patient search may yet discover them, and even do something more to elucidate the life of the Columbus family in Savona.
Savona.
There has been brought into prominence and published lately a memoir of the illustrious natives of Savona, written by a lawyer, Giovanni Vincenzo Verzellino, who died in that town in 1638. This document was printed at Savona in 1885, under the editorial care of Andrea Astengo; but Harrisse has given greater currency to its elucidations for our purpose in his Christophe Colomb et Savone (Genoa, 1877).
Genoa notarial records.
Harrisse is not unwisely confident that the nineteen documents—if no more have been added—throwing light on minor points of the obscure parts of the life of Columbus and his kindred, which during recent years have been discovered in the notarial files of Genoa by the Marquis Marcello Staglieno, may be only the precursors of others yet to be unearthed, and that the pages of the Giornale Ligustico may continue to record such discoveries as it has in the past.
Records of the Bank of St. George.
The records of the Bank of Saint George in Genoa have yielded something, but not much. In the state archives of Genoa, preserved since 1817 in the Palazzetto, we might hope to find some report of the great discovery, of which the Genoese ambassadors, Francesco Marchesio and Gian Antonio Grimaldi, were informed, just as they were taking leave of Ferdinand and Isabella for returning to Italy; but nothing of that kind has yet been brought to light there; nor was it ever there, unless the account which Senarega gives in the narrative printed in Muratori was borrowed thence. We may hope, but probably in vain, to have these public archives determine if Columbus really offered to serve his native country in a voyage of discovery. The inquirer is more fortunate if he explores what there is left of the archives of the old abbey of St. Stephen, which, since the suppression of the convents in 1797, have been a part of the public papers, for he can find in them some help in solving some pertinent questions.
Vatican archives.