No. IV.

LINEAGE OF COLUMBUS.

THE ancestry of Christopher Columbus has formed a point of zealous controversy, which is not yet satisfactorily settled. Several honourable families, possessing domains in Placentia, Montferrat, and the different parts of the Genoese territories, claim him as belonging to their houses; and to these has recently been added the noble family of Colombo in Modena.' The natural desire to prove consanguinity with a man of distinguished renown has excited this rivalry; but it has been heightened, in particular instances, by the hope of succeeding to titles and situations of wealth and honour, when his male line of descendants became extinct. The investigation is involved in particular obscurity, as even his

VOL. IV.

Spotorno, Hist. Mem., p. 5.

6

immediate relatives appear to have been in ignorance on the subject.

Fernando Columbus, in his biography of the Admiral, after a pompous prelude, in which he attempts to throw a vague and cloudy magnificence about the origin of his father, notices slightly the attempts of some to obscure his fame, by making him a native of various small and insignificant villages; and dwells with more complacency upon others, who make him a native of places in which there were persons of much honour of the name, and many sepulchral monuments with arms and epitaphs of the Colombos. He relates his having himself gone to the castle of Cugureo, to visit two brothers of the family of Colombo, who were rich and noble, the youngest of whom was above one hundred years of age, and who he had heard were relatives of his father; but they could give him no information upon the subject; whereupon he breaks forth into his professed contempt for these adventitious claims, declaring, that he thinks it better to content himself with dating from the glory of the Admiral, than to go about inquiring

whether his father « were a merchant, or one who kept his hawks; » ' since, adds he, of persons of similar pursuits there are thousands who die every day, whose memory even among their own neighbours and relatives perishes immediately, without its being possible afterwards to ascertain even whether they existed.

After this and a few more expressions of similar disdain for these empty distinctions, he indulges in vehement abuse of Agostino Giustiniani, whom he calls a false historian, an inconsiderate, partial, or malignant compatriot, for having in his Psalter traduced his father, by saying that in his youth he had been employed in mechanical occupations.

As, after all this discussion, Fernando leaves the question of his father's parentage in all its original obscurity, yet appears irritably sensitive to any derogatory suggestions of others, his whole evidence tends to the conviction

Literally, in the original, Cazador de Volateria, a falconer. Hawking was in those days an amusement of the highest classes, and to keep hawks was almost a sign of nobility.

that he really knew nothing to boast of in his

ancestry.

Of the nobility and antiquity of the Colombo family, of which the Admiral probably was a remote descendant, we have some account in Herrera. << We learn," he says, « that the emperor Otto the Second, in 940, confirmed to the counts Pietro, Giovanni, and Alexandro Colombo, brothers, the feudatory possessions which they held within the jurisdiction of the cities of Ayqui, Savona, Aste, Montferrato, Turin, Viceli, Parma, Cremona, and Bergamo, and all others which they held in Italy. It appears that the Colombos of Cuccaro, Cucureo, and Placentia were the same, and that the emperor in the same year '940' made donation to the said three brothers of the castles of Cuccaro, Conzano, Rosignano, and others, and of the fourth part of Bistanio, which appertained to the empire.» 1

One of the boldest attempts of those biographers bent on ennobling Columbus, has been to make him son of the lord of Cuccaro,

! Herrera, decad. 1, l. i, c. vii.

a burgh of Montferrat in Piedmont, and to state that he was born in his father's castle at that place. From hence it is said Columbus and his brothers eloped at an early age, and never returned. This was asserted in the course of a suit, instituted by a certain Baldassare, or Balthasar Colombo, resident in Genoa, but originally of Cuccaro, claiming the title and estates on the death of Diego Colon, Duke of Veragua, in 1578, the great-grandson and last legitimate male descendant of the Admiral. The Council of the Indies decided against this claim to relationship. Some account of the lawsuit will be found in another part of this work.

This romantic story, like all others of the nobility of his parentage, is at utter variance with the subsequent events of the Admiral's life, his long struggles with indigence and obscurity, and the difficulties he endured from the want of family connexions. How can it be believed, says Bossi, that this same man, who, in his most cruel adversities, was incessantly taunted by his enemies with the obscurity of his birth, should not reply to this re