Age. Columbus is in the company of scholastics who,
between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, strove
to systematize knowledge by reconciling Aristotle and
other pagan authors with Christian doctrine. If this
literary infl uence is not explicit in his Diario or much
of his early writing, it would become so in response
to protests voiced by his enemies in the Spanish court
for his administrative tactics in Hispaniola and for his
failure to meet the expectations fueled by the enterprise
of the Indies. The list of authors directly or indirectly
cited, or alluded to, by Columbus is too extensive to
mention here, but striking examples of his reliance on
the auctores sanctioned by scholastics may be found in
his Letter of the Third Voyage (1498) and his Libro de las
profecías (1501–1502), a compilation and commentary
of mostly scriptural passages that he thought signifi ed
his discovery as the fi nal stage in completing God’s
apocalyptic scheme. Columbus was strongly infl uenced
by Franciscan eschatology, particularly by the ideas of
the Calabrian Joachim of Fiore friar.
No record exists of Columbus’s formal schooling
except for the assertion, forwarded by the bibliophile
Hernando Colón (Fernando Columbus) in the apologetic
biography of his father, that Columbus had attended the
university in Pavia. Columbus was probably an astute
autodidact who absorbed the theology and philosophy of
his time from the ecclesiastic and scientifi c communities
in the courts of Portugal and Spain, and, particularly,
from the important monastic learning centers of Santa
María de la Rábida and Nuestra Señora Santa María de
las Cuevas in Spain.
The earliest and most infl uential accounts of the
admiral’s learning are provided by Hernando and by the
Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, Columbus’s
most devoted early biographer, in his Historia de las
Indias (completed in 1559). Both biographers—the lat-
ter follows Hernando’s lead almost to the letter—offer a
list of authors who appear to have kindled the admiral’s
wish to cross the ocean. According to Hernando and
las Casas, Columbus’ s belief that the greater part of
the globe had been circumnavigated and that only the
space between Asia’s eastern end and the Azores and
Cape Verde Islands remained to be discovered comes
from the Alexandrine astronomer Ptolemy, the Greek
geographers Marinus of Tyre, and Strabo, the Greek
physician and historian Ctesias, Onesicritus and Ne-
archus, respectively captain and admiral to Alexander
the Great during the Macedonian campaign in India, the
Roman historian Pliny the Elder, and the Arabic astrono-
mer Alfraganus. Likewise, his belief that the distance
between continents was small rests, in their view, on
the works of Aristotle, the Córdoban astronomer Aver-
röes, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca,
the Roman poet and grammarian Gaius Julius Solinus,
the Venetian Marco Polo, the fi ctional author Sir John
of Mandeville, the French theologian and natural phi-
losopher Cardinal Peter Aliacus, and the Roman writer
Julius Capitolinus. Las Casas, clearly more schooled
than the discoverer, adds a list of Christian and pagan
auctores from whom Columbus might have persuaded
himself of the plausibility of his project. Whether Co-
lumbus was as learned as Hernando and las Casas claim
is still the subject of debate. Columbus probably owes
his acquaintance with many auctores in the scholastic
tradition to encyclopedic works such as Peter Aliacus’s
widely read Ymago mundi (1410–1414) and Pliny the
Elder’s Historia naturalis.
The most concrete evidence of Columbus’s learning
are the incunabula he is known to have possessed. A few
of these volumes, held in the Biblioteca Colombina of
Seville, contain abundant postilles by his hand, a number
of which betray fi rsthand knowledge of numerous other
works. The following volumes have long been identi-
fi ed as his: an extensive geographical treatise by the
humanist Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II),
Historia rerum ubique gestarum (1477); Peter Aliacus’s
Ymago mundi (1483); Francesco Pipino’s Latin transla-
tion of Marco Polo’s II milione: De consuetudinibus et
conditionibus orientalium regionum (1485); and the
manuscript of the Libro de las pro fecías (dated 1504).
Others identifi ed in 1891 as Columbus’s are the follow-
ing: Christophoro Landino’s Italian translation of Pliny
the elder’s work: Historia naturale (1489); Abraham
Zacut’s Almanach perpetuum (1496), which contained
a tabulation of planetary aspects and may have helped
Columbus predict an eclipse on Jamaica (1504); Alfonso
de Palencia’s Spanish translation of Plutarch’s Parallel
Lives (Vidas de los ilustres varones, 1491); a manuscript
of the anonymous fi fteenth-century Concordiae Bibliae
Cardinalis, which may have furnished Columbus with
quotes for his Libro. Albertus Magnus’s Philosophia
naturalis (Venice 1496), also known as Philosophia
pauperum, containing the saint’s commentaries to the
works of Aristotle’s cosmology: Physics, On the Heav-
ens, Metereology, On Generation and Corruption, and
On the Soul, St. Antoninus of Florence’s confessional
guide, the Sumula confessionis (1476); and a fi fteenth-
century palimpsest of Seneca’s tragedies containing
the Medea, from which Columbus extracted a passage
foretelling the discovery of a new orb.
Las Casas judged the Ymago mundi to be the primary
source for the enterprise of the Indies. Peter Aliacus
wrote this series of treatises in preparation for the
Council at Constance, which ended the Western Schism
(1414). The Ymago mundi, essentially an astrological
work, includes a systematic account of the geocentric
world, incorporating ancient geoethnography into the
theoretical frames of Aristotle’s physics and Ptolemy’s
scientia stellarum. Although this work’s infl uence on
Columbus has been discussed primarily on the basis ofCOLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER