Christopher Columbus italian name was Cristoforo Colombo. He was a citizen of the Republic of Genoa.
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Between 1492 and 1503, Christopher Columbus completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Americas, all of them under the sponsorship of the Crown of Castile.
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When Columbus "discovered" the Americas, the continent was already inhabited by 90 million people which was a third of the world's population.
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Leif Erikson is regarded as the first European to land in North America, nearly 500 years before Columbus.
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2200 years ago, Eratosthenes estimated the Earth's circumference using math, without ever leaving Egypt. He was remarkably accurate. Christopher Columbus later studied him.
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Christopher Columbus correctly predicted an eclipse to trick the native inhabitants of Jamaica into giving him food and supplies.
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There's a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus alive today. He's a Spanish noble.
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Over 3 million people perished from war, slavery, and the mines in Hispaniola under the rule of Christopher Columbus.
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No one knows what Christopher Columbus looked like. No authentic contemporary portraits of him were found. Most just reconstructed his appearance from written descriptions.
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Christopher Columbus thought that the world was shaped like a woman's breast.
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Machu Picchu was built around 1450 CE, less than 50 years before Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World.
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Towards the end of his life, Christopher Columbus produced a "Book of Prophecies," in which his career as an explorer is interpreted in the light of Christian eschatology and of apocalypticism.
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Christopher Columbus brought the first lemon seeds to America.
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Christopher Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery.
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Christopher Columbus thought he saw mermaids in 1493, but from his description, they were probably manatees.
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Christopher Columbus showed a keen interest in the Bible and in Biblical prophecies, and would often quote biblical texts in his letters and logs.
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The last Moorish kingdom in Spain fell in the same year Columbus reached the Americas.
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When Christopher Columbus needed a place to store his loot, he went to the Banco di San Giorgio in Genoa, Italy, the world's first public modern bank.
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Some historians believe that Columbus visited Iceland's Snaefellsnes Peninsula in 1477 and there learned of Viking explorations of the New World.
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Christopher Columbus was not a scholarly man and yet, he learned Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian, and read widely about astronomy, geography, and history.
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Christopher Columbus's strained relationship with the Spanish crown led to his arrest and dismissal as governor of the settlements on the island of Hispaniola in 1500.
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