On This Date 525 Years Ago…
An occasional blog—with “Dates” based on the Julian calendar used by Europeans in 1492.
April 1493
Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand didn’t wait for Columbus to arrive in Barcelona to proclaim the triumph of their sponsorship of Columbus’s voyage or assert dominion over the Taíno territory he had explored. On April 1, 1493, after some editing, they published...
read moreMid-April, 1493
By April 11, Columbus and six Taínos departed Seville for Barcelona, traveling by mule on a route through Córdoba, Murcia, and Valencia, as shown in red superimposed on the map contained in Encounters Unforeseen: Crowds gathered as Columbus passed through to observe...
read moreMarch 31-April 10, 1493
On March 31, 1493, then Palm Sunday, Columbus and the ten Taínos arrived at Seville, shown below c. 1588 (Civitates Orbis Terrarum). They would have entered by the bridge over the Guadalquivir in the lower left (a predecessor to the present Puente de Isabel II),...
read moreMarch 15-29, 1493
Columbus’s Journal provides a European historical record of daily events over a seven-month period (August 3, 1492 through March 15, 1493) which is unusual for the 15th century and far exceeds in detail and specificity the related historical record preceding or...
read moreFriday, March 15, 1493
Columbus, crew, and the ten Taínos aboard the Niña departed Portugal on March 13 and anchored two days later at Palos, Spain, the small port from which the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María had departed on August 3, 1492. Coincidentally, the Pinta returned to Palos the...
read moreSunday, March 10, 1493
The house in the parish of Vale do Paraíso (northeast of Lisbon) where Columbus and the Taínos met King John II still exists, shown below (to the right). King John didn’t believe Columbus’s account of his voyage and asked two Taínos separately to draw a map of their...
read moreFriday, March 8, 1493
Portugal’s King John II summoned Columbus to meet northeast of Lisbon, and Columbus brought along at least two of the Taínos. The route to meet John wove through Lisbon, shown below c.1598 (a century later) in Civitates Orbis Terrarum: As dramatized in Encounters...
read moreMonday, March 4, 1493
At dawn on March 4, Columbus recognized the Rock of Sintra offshore Lisbon, Portugal, and sailed the battered Niña to take refuge in Lisbon’s outer harbor. He knew Portugal’s King John II, having spent a few years trying to convince John to sponsor the voyage (in the...
read moreSunday, March 3, 1493
Columbus, crew, and the ten Taínos aboard the Niña departed the Azores for Spain on February 24 and suffered more rough weather. Another violent storm enveloped them after sunset on March 3 and, within sight of the Portuguese coast, they almost perished again. The...
read moreEarly March, 1493
The Niña’s crew had lost sight of the Pinta during the storms off the Azores on the night of February 13 and surmised it had sunk. But the Pinta had survived, and its captain, Martín Alonso Pinzón, brought it to harbor at Bayona on Castile’s western coast, north of...
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