In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That is the opening line of a Columbus Day poem that American school children had to learn for many years. It will also serve as the lead-in for this article about the momentous year of 1492 with its 4 major events and their significant consequences.

The first three involve Spain and the first of those was the completion of the Reconquista. The Reconquista was the l-o-n-g 781-year process of Christendom reconquering the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic rule. It took from 711, when the Umayyad armies from North Africa conquered the Peninsula, until 2 January 1492 to accomplish with the fall of the last Muslim stronghold of Granada. That set the stage for what would come next. Now that Spain was fully Christian and had no more Muslim enemies to fight on its soil, it could then turn its considerable naval and military strength to outside ventures. The age of exploration and conquest was about to begin. However, there was an internal issue they wanted to start dealing with right away.

The Christian leaders, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, working from a base of their previous actions, seemed ready to start dealing with their Jewish and Muslim subjects once and for all. The hammer fell on the Jews first. On 31 March 1492 the Alhambra Decree ordered the expulsion of all practicing Jews by 31 July of the same year. The main impetus for this extreme action came from Tomas de Torquemada, a Dominican friar who became the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He had it in for practicing Jews because he thought they were a bad influence on formerly Jewish conversos (recent converts to Christianity) who might be led back into practicing their original faith. His constant urging finally pushed Ferdinand and Isabella to act after the fall of Grenada.

It did not go well for the Jews whether they converted to Christianity to avoid being expelled or left the kingdom. Those who converted were constantly under suspicion of secretly practicing their old faith and always had to look over their shoulders for the Inquisition and its agents. Between 40,000 and 200,000 Jews were expelled by the end of July, an accurate number being hard to pin down. The short time span given them to leave forced the Jews to sell their property and businesses at fire-sale prices.^[1] Tens of thousands of the expellees would perish while trying to reach safety. Some were murdered by the very Spanish ship captains who had massively overcharged them and then looted their remaining wealth, while others fell to bandits in Spain who had heard rumors that Jews had swallowed their gold and gemstones, cutting open their bodies to try to retrieve the alleged goods.^[2]

Those who successfully got away ended up settling all across the Mediterranean. The luckiest of them were those who went to the Ottoman Empire. Sultan Bayezid II commanded ‘all the governors of his European provinces, ordering them not only to refrain from repelling the Spanish refugees, but to give them a friendly and welcome reception. He threatened with death all those who treated the Jews harshly or refused them admission into the empire.’^[3] He was also quoted as saying “You venture to call Ferdinand a wise ruler, he who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine!”^[4] His criticism of the Spanish monarchs was well founded. The Jews, along with the Muslims (who were soon to be expelled as well), formed an important part of the Spanish middle class. What Bayezid understood that his Spanish counterparts failed to realize was that they were deporting a good chunk of their middle class to the Ottoman Empire’s benefit. The Turks gained economically from this historical event, while the Spanish didn’t really feel the negative effects until their looting of the New World petered out. Only then did the loss of much of their middle class make itself felt.

The third event of 1492 is the most well-know: Christopher Columbus sailed west on his quest to find a sea route to Asia. As we all know, he rediscovered the Americas instead, though he was convinced to his dying day that he had found his fabled Asia. Thus began the age of exploration, conquest and subjugation. I am not going to go over what most people already know, so I will talk briefly about a couple of myths regarding Columbus.

The first is the ridiculous idea that he and his crew thought the world was flat. No one did. That is because that at around 350 BC, Aristotle ‘declared that the Earth was a sphere (based on observations he made about which constellations you could see in the sky as you travelled further and further away from the equator).'^[5] In the 3rd century BC, Greek polymath Eratosthenes of Cyrene even calculated the circumference of the Earth with amazing accuracy. The myth about Columbus’ misbelief originated in the semi-fictional book The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus written by Washington Irving in 1828. In it, Irving states that Columbus set out to prove the world is round.^[6] Thus, the myth was born.

The second myth regards what he was intending to accomplish. He wasn’t trying to discover a new continent, nor was he sailing off into the wild unknown not knowing what he would find. He set off to find a sea route to India and to prove that Asia was much closer than anyone realized.^[7] That is because he knew there was a sizable continent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. How did he know that? Because the Vikings had colonies in Iceland and Greenland. After they became Christian around 1000 AD, Bishops assigned to the colonies maintained a constant correspondence with the Vatican. Maps were produced of these northern regions that even showed parts of Canada. That is because the Vikings not only explored that part of the world, but they also set up a settlement on Newfoundland (see L’Anse aux Meadows) and used the newly found continent as a place to find resources (timber, furs) for their other colonies. The maps they produced are what is important for us here. They were known in Northern Europe as well as the Vatican, so it takes no real stretch of the imagination to connect the dots here. Christopher Columbus knew he would find a continent when he sailed west, and he knew it was rather close compared to how far away others though Asia was. He just did not realize it was a whole new land he was about the unlock for European domination.

The fourth and final event of 1492 takes us far away from Spain to the small present-day country of Estonia. In the eastern city of Narva along the Narva River, a powerful fortification called the Hermann Castle was controlled by the powerful Livonian Order. To counter it, Ivan III of the Grand Duchy of Moscow had the castle of Ivangorod built on the opposite side of the river. That set the Narva River as the border between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. Even today, the Narva is the border between the European Union/NATO and Russia, separating the East from the West.

Sources

BAJAZET II. – JewishEncyclopedia.com

Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John. The Noticeably Stouter Book of General Ignorance. London, England: Faber and Faber Limited, 2009.

The Spanish Expulsion (1492) (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

Who figured out the Earth is round? (nasa.gov)

1. The Spanish Expulsion (1492) (jewishvirtuallibrary.org[↩]
2. Ibid.[↩]
3. BAJAZET II. – JewishEncyclopedia.comencyc.[↩]
4. Ibid.[↩]
5. Who figured out the Earth is round? ((nasa.gov[↩]
6. Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John. The Noticeably Stouter Book of General Ignorance. London, England: Faber and Faber Limited, 2009.[↩]
7. Ibid.[↩]