STATUE OF COLUMBUS AT SANTO DOMINGO.
The long sway of the Moors was disintegrating. The Arab domination in science and seamanship was yielding to the Western genius. The Turks had in the boyhood (1453) of Columbus consummated their last great triumph in the capture of Constantinople, thus placing a barrier to Christian commerce with the East. This conquest drove out the learned Christians of the East, who had drunk of the Arab erudition, and they fled with their stores of learning to the western lands, coming back to the heirs of the Romans with the spirit which Rome in the past had sent to the East.
But what Christian Europe was losing in the East Portugal and Prince Henry were gaining for her in the great and forbidding western waste of waters and along its African shores. As the hot tide of Mahometan invasion rolled over the Bosphorus, the burning equatorial zone was pierced from the north along the coasts of the Black Continent.
Italian discoverers.
His growing belief in the western passage.
Italy, seeing her maritime power drop away as the naval supremacy of the Atlantic seaboard rose, was forced to send her experienced navigators to the oceanic ports, to maintain the supremacy of her name and genius in Cadamosto, Columbus, Vespucius, Cabot, and Verrazano. Those cosmographical views which had come down the ages, at times obscured, then for a while patent, and of which the traces had lurked in the minds of learned men by an almost continuous sequence for many centuries, at last possessed by inheritance the mind of Columbus. By reading, by conference with others, by noting phenomena, and by reasoning, in the light of all these, upon the problem of a western passage to India, obvious as it was if once the sphericity of the earth be acknowledged, he gradually grew to be confident in himself and trustful in his agency with others. He was far from being alone in his beliefs, nor was his age anything more than a reflection of long periods of like belief.
Deficiencies of character.