Texts in Context:
The Ocean Blue
By Gabriel Blanchard
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, the globe was changed irrevocably, forever.
Popular Lies About Christopher Columbus
i. He was called Christopher Columbus.
This isn’t a terribly important lie, but since we’re here. As he was (probably) Genoese,1 his mother tongue would have been Ligurian; in that language his name was Cristoffa Corombo. As for his professional name, the monarchs who finally gambled on his voyage were those of Aragon and Castile, so he was addressed for that purpose with the Spanish Cristóbal Colón. (We get the English version of his name by putting it in its Latin form, Christophorus Columbus, and then Anglicizing that, lest madness ensue.)
ii. He discovered the world was round.
This had been known for millennia in 1492, by all educated people. (Well, barring Cosmas Indicopleustes. But we got rid of him by telling him to go and stand in the world’s corner; he’s still looking for one.) This error’s falsehood is slowly returning to the status of general knowledge.
In the third century BC, a geometer named Eratosthenes (then head of the Library of Alexandria) had even estimated the circumference of the earth, and was off by less than 2%! In fact, this was a motive for the king and queen’s reluctance: At some stage in his calculations, Señor Colón, who like most people at the time relied chiefly on Arab-made maps, mixed up Arabic miles with the significantly shorter Roman mile. He therefore believed the globe was far smaller than it really was—to the tune of ten thousand miles. It was unbelievably good luck for him the Americas were barring his way. If they hadn’t been, his whole crew might have starved to death on the open ocean.
But the gravest lie of the three, which ironically is also the most ridiculous, is …
iii. He discovered the Americas.
Given he met people in the Americas, he clearly did not discover them. Even if we specify the discovery of the Americas by Europeans, Leif Erikson beat Columbus here by centuries; there really is no way seriously to support the claim that he discovered the place.
That said, Señor Colón did inaugurate regular trans-Atlantic voyages and establish the first long-term contact between the eastern and western hemispheres—no small feat. The Old World and the Americas alike were irrevocably altered by it.
Six Authors in Search of a Reading Public2
Our Author Bank, which offers those the texts to which this series gives context, features six names whose birth dates fall between the invention of the printing press and the date when Señor Colón sailed the proverbial ocean blue. Two were subjects of the Holy Roman Emperor, both Catholic priests (one a Dutchman, the other a Saxon); one was a Florentine diplomat and man of letters (Florence was now for all practical purposes independent); one was a Polish cleric3; one was an English lawyer; and the last and youngest was a Castilian, himself loosely connected with Columbus. He saw the handful of Taíno who came through Seville with Columbus when he returned in 1493, and his father partook in the second of the navigator’s four voyages across the Atlantic.
Fr. Desiderius Erasmus van Rotterdam, 1466-1536
The aforesaid Dutchman—formally, he was a canon belonging roughly to the Brethren of the Common Life.4 Founded in the fourteenth century, this society promoted the devotio moderna, a pietistic reform movement (popular in what are now Germany and the Low Countries) emphasizing humility and simplicity; The Imitation of Christ remains the most famous expression of the devotio moderna. However, Erasmus’ interests were scholarly, and he spent more time out of his community than in it. He composed a number of satires—Praise of Folly is the best known, though Julius Excluded From Heaven is the present author’s personal favorite—and carried on a long correspondence with a friend he made during a visit to Oxford University (of whom More in a moment).
Most significant of all, in 1516, Erasmus was responsible for producing the single greatest masterpiece of Renaissance scholarship, the Textus Receptus (“received text”), or as he titled it, the Novum Instrumentum Omne (“whole new tool”). Its reputation has in one sense fallen dramatically—most scholars now consider it representative of the weakest family of the New Testament textual tradition5; nevertheless, the Textus Receptus was at the time unprecedented. It featured not only a fresh Latin translation, one its author claimed was superior to the Vulgate, but the Greek text itself on the opposite page, since people all over Western Europe were now learning Greek as well as Latin and could make use of such a thing. More important still, it included Erasmus’ notes throughout the text, explaining the textual and rational authorities he had based his choice of text upon where one Greek manuscript differed from another. These constituted the first known form of the critical apparatus, an indispensable tool for all analysis of the history of ancient literature. Besides its influence on Martin Luther, the Textus Receptus was the basis of most early English translations of the Bible, including Tyndale’s in 1526, Coverdale’s in 1535, the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, and of course the version authorized by King James VI and I6 in 1611.
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, 1469-1527
We come next to the citizen of the Republic of Florence (which would be turned into a hereditary duchy by Pope Clement VII in 1569). Machiavelli’s name today is associated with extreme cynicism, as expressed by sociopathically manipulating others. This is quite a pity: Machiavelli seems to have been no nastier than an average exponent of the Italian Renaissance, and nicer than some; more to the purpose, his notorious work The Prince, from which this reputation for cynicism derives, is widely believed by scholars today to be a satire of monarchism. (Given the reputed outrage of the British public at Swift for advocating cannibalism in “A Modest Proposal,” the idea that a large proportion of people have simply failed to get a joke for a few hundred years is credible.) He is certainly known both to have both worked practically to defend Florence’s independent, elective government, and also to have written advocating that form as preferable to monarchy, particularly in his Discourses on Livy.
Mikołaj Kopernik (Nicolaus Copernicus), 1473-1543
It’s a pity we have spent no real time on the history of Medieval Poland, which is quite interesting. We at least nod to it in our next individual, a polymath hailing from Kraków, then the capital of the country. In addition to a lifelong interest in astronomy, culminating in his (almost!) entirely new theory of the arrangement of the cosmos, Kopernik took an interest in the newly-expanded field of Greek Classics. He also contributed to the foundations of modernity on a quite unexpected plane: economics. Many economic theories have come and gone; one of the oldest surviving theories, the quantity theory of money,7 has been around since the early sixteenth century. It may first have been formulated by Kopernik—in the year 1517.
Christ wanted love to be called his single commandment. This we owe to all men. Nobody is excepted.
Those first three, we were able to deal with about as much as we need to. The remaining three, realistically, we can only introduce for the moment.
Sir Thomas More, 1478-1535 (knighted in 1521)
A commoner by birth, More attended Oxford University. There he met Erasmus, with whom he became fast friends for the rest of his life (which is the more remarkable, in that Erasmus could be a bit prickly). Though More considered becoming a monk, he ultimately resolved to remain “in the world” and pursue a career in law. He married, and had three daughters and a son; widowed after just six years, he remarried, gaining himself a stepdaughter and two foster daughters. Quite unusually for the time, he insisted on educating all his daughters as well as his son, and his eldest, Margaret, drew much praise for her elegant Latin (in which More himself was as fluent as in English). His character displayed a series of traits not often found together in such intensity: boldness; piety; intelligence; charm; and incorruptibility.
The first and last of these traits did not endear him to King Henry VII, who was a something of a petty old goblin. But in 1509, something lovely happened: Henry VII died. He was succeeded by his son, Henry VIII, then a boy of eighteen to More’s thirty-one. More got on famously with Henry and his queen, Katharine of Aragon (whose great-grandmother was yet another descendant of John of Gaunt—her extra dash of Plantagenet blood certainly did nothing to hurt the legitimacy of the still-newly-dynastic Tudors). Indeed, they got on so well that about twenty years later, Henry VIII appointed More to the office of Lord High Chancellor. This more or less made him the lord chief justice,8 second-in-command to His Majesty alone.
Back in the “Angevin” days (see footnote 4 of this post), Henry’s ten-times-great-grandfather, King Henry II, had also appointed a close personal friend named Thomas, who likewise happened to be a commoner, to the office of Chancellor of England. Of course, that Henry’s wife, though also clouded by a suggestion of illegitimacy about their marriage, was named Eleanor and not Katharine, so perhaps the sixteenth-century monarch thought it would end well this time. As so often, we will be coming back to this.
Fr. Martin Luder (or Luther), 1483-1546
Let’s rewind a little; make it, say, eight years after Henry VIII’s accession. From London, where More is writing his books and letters, we must carry our gaze just over two hundred miles eastward to find Rotterdam, where Erasmus may or may not be. But wherever he is, he’s sure to be hard at work on revisions to his Novum Instrumentum Omne: The first edition came out last year, and it was well received, but he feels its Latin could be a good deal better, really; more importantly, a number of trivial errors in the printing of the Greek text need correcting, and incidentally, he just recently came upon yet another Greek manuscript, written in minuscule, which he’d like to consult for this edition …
Go on nearly twice as far again, in an almost straight line, and we find another canon, an Augustinian this time. He lives in the city of Wittenberg, and you know perfectly well what he’s doing in 1517. Don’t play that game.
However. Church doors were a bit like public bulletin boards at the time. Nailing a thesis (or indeed, a set of theses) to them was rather along the lines of submitting a proposal for formal debate among the local divinity students—less “punk rebellion against the establishment,” more “respectable nerd, member of club of respected nerds, suggests club do some nerd things.” It didn’t stay that way; but it did start that way.
Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P., Protector de los Indios, 1484-1566
Last but not least, in 1517, our young Castilian boy has grown into a thirty-three year old man. Fifteen years before, he and his father (the one who went with Cristoffa Corombo on “round two”) had emigrated to Hispaniola, the second-largest island in the Caribbean, where they owned a few encomiendas—something between a plantation and a start-up. Unlike plantations, which as the name suggests are always agricultural, encomiendas were often economic enterprises of other kinds; in the early sixteenth century, they were frequently gold mines (in the literal sense of the phrase).
Though young Bartolomé is sufficiently religious and reflective that he has chosen to enter the priesthood, he is in certain ways a child of his age. Some while ago, in 1510, a group of Dominican friars had come to Hispaniola, and found themselves appalled by the treatment of the local indigenous folk who had to work the encomiendas. (Incidentally, after the region had been conquered by the Spanish explorers, Queen Isabella of Castile—who seems to have been one of those small-minded, stuffy people who says things like I’d have thought explorers would need more maps and fewer muskets—promptly decreed that, if that was now her kingdom, then its people were her subjects, just like Castilians, and must be treated the same way.) The friars, however, began telling owners of encomiendas, not just in the confessional but from the pulpit, that they had a moral duty to free every last one of their … “employees.” They went further: It wasn’t long before—to the indignance of many, Fr. de las Casas included—they were refusing to give confession or absolution to any slave-owner until and unless he manumitted the lot. Smells like an Early Modern Period to this writer …
1Genoa lies on the northern Italian coast, opposite Corsica. It was one of the more important Italian city-states before unification: Like its rival, Venice, Genoa was a seafaring “crowned republic” whose influence extended far into the east; by the thirteenth century, the Genoese had a established trade presence in the Ægean and Black Seas.
2If you haven’t read or seen Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, do!—postmodern theater at its rare best. It has nothing to do with the subject at hand, but I’ve already told you about it.
3Not all clergy were then (or now are) priests. Besides the “major orders” of bishop, priest, and deacon, the Catholic Church once recognized certain “minor orders” (which were both ministries in their own right and preparatory training for major orders). Entry upon these was marked by tonsure, a ritual shaving off of part of the hair of the head. This indicated the recipient had entered the clerical state, a prerequisite for education in much of Europe at the time. Especially as the Middle Ages wore on, many people who were tonsured for the sake of accessing education did not pursue Holy Orders further; however, anyone who was tonsured was still regarded as a “cleric,” which, combined with the educational situation, is how the word clerk got its meaning.
4Canons are priests who live and minister in the secular world, but do so in communities which live according to a semi-monastic rule (usually that of St. Augustine—Pope Leo XIV was an Augustinian canon, before his recent elevation). Erasmus was not technically a member of the Brethren of the Common Life; rather, his community used a rule of life based on that of the Brethren.
5There are three such families, defined by shared traits in the text they present (traits like having versus omitting a disputed set of verses, for instance). These three families are the Alexandrian, the Western, and the Byzantine—a fourth possible family, the Cæsarean, is debated. To grossly oversimplify the topic, most scholars today consider the Alexandrian family the most accurate representative of the original New Testament text, and the Byzantine the poorest.
6The monarch we mostly refer to as just “King James” in the US was King James I of England, as of 1603; however, he had been King James VI of Scotland since 1567, at scarcely over a year old—hence, James VI and I. (King James I of Scotland was his great-great-great-great-grandfather and the third monarch of the House of Stuart.)
7Put in simple terms, the quantity theory of money states that, within a given economy, the general price of goods and services is proportional to the money supply—a higher money supply means higher prices, and vice versa. This is an important part of understanding inflation; e.g., in the seventeenth century, the huge (but irregular) influx of silver mined in the New World, far from benefiting the Spanish economy (as mercantilist theory predicted it should have), depressed it.
8Of course, it didn’t really mean this, because “Lord Chief Justice” is also a title in the British administration. And of course the person who holds the title “Lord Chief Justice” is the second-highest ranking justice minister in the country. What else would it mean. (The Lord Chief Justice is beneath the Chancellor; for practical purposes, the Prime Minister is now the more powerful figure, but the Chancellor outranks him on paper even today—as for that matter does the, you know, king.)
Gabriel Blanchard (a respectable nerd, in the sense of being a nerd who could in principle be a grammatical object of the verb “to respect”) is CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
Thank you for reading the CLT Journal. If you enjoyed this piece and would like to read more, you can find the entirety of the in-progress Rhetorica and Texts in Context series at the link; you might also like our Great Conversation series (explained more fully and indexed in this post), analyzing the many topics of research, discussion, and contemplation that make up the intellectual heritage of our culture.
Published on 23rd June, 2025. Page image of the “Columbus map,” created ca. 1490 in Lisbon, Portugal, in the workshop of Christopher and his brother Bartolomeo Columbus.