Christopher Columbus Cristoforo Colombo was born some time before 31 October 1451 in the Republic of Genoa. His father, Domenico Colombo, was a wool weaver who worked in Genoa and Savona and who also owned a cheese stand at which young Christopher worked as a helper. His mother was Susanna Fontanarossa. He had three brothers, Bartolomeo, Giovanni Pellegrino, Giacomo and a sister, Bianchinetta. His brother, Bartolomeo, worked in a cartography workshop in Lisbon for at least part of his adulthood. Columbus never wrote in his native language, which is presumed to have been a Genoese variety of Ligurian. He claimed to have first gone to sea at the age of 10. In 1470, the Columbus family moved to Savona, on the Ligurian coast west of Genoa, where Domenico took over a tavern. In that year, Christopher was serving on a Genoese ship hired to the service of René of Anjou who was attempting to conquer the Kingdom of Naples In 1473, Columbus began his apprenticeship as business agent for the Centurione, Di Negro and Spinola families of Genoa. In May 1476, he took part in an armed convoy sent by Genoa to carry valuable cargo to northern Europe. Some writers speculate that in 1477, he travelled to Iceland. It is known that in the autumn of 1477, he sailed on a Portuguese ship from Galway to Lisbon, where he found his brother Bartolomeo and they continued trading for the Centurione family. Columbus based himself in Lisbon from 1477 to 1485. He married Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, daughter of the Porto Santo governor and Portuguese nobleman of Lombardian origin Bartolomeu Perestrello. In 1479 or 1480, his son Diego Columbus was born. Between 1482 and 1485, Columbus traded along the coasts of West Africa, reaching the Portuguese trading post of Elmina on the Guinea coast (in present-day Ghana). Some records report that Filipa died sometime around 1485, while Columbus was away in Castile. He returned to Portugal to settle her estate and take his son Diego with him. He left Portugal for Castile in 1485, where he took a mistress in 1487, a 20-year-old orphan named Beatriz Enríquez de Arana. It is likely that Beatriz met Columbus when he was in Córdoba, a gathering site of many Genoese merchants and where the court of the Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella) was located at intervals. In July 1488, Beatriz, unmarried at the time, gave birth to Columbus's son, Fernando, named after the king of Aragon. Columbus recognized the boy as his offspring. Columbus eventually learned Latin, Portuguese and Castilian. He read widely about astronomy, geography, and history, including the works of Claudius Ptolemy, Pierre, Cardinal d'Ailly's "Imago Mundi", "the travels of Marco Polo" and Pliny's "Natural History". Although not naturally scholarly, he studied these books, making hundreds of marginal notes in them and developed ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong, but sometimes wrong. Columbus may have estimated the distance from the Canary Islands west to Japan to be about 5,300 nautical miles or 2,000 nmi, depending on which estimate he used for Eurasia's longitudinal span. The true figure is now known to be about 11,000 nmi. No ship in the 15th century could have carried enough food and fresh water for such a long voyage and the dangers involved in navigating through the uncharted ocean would have been formidable. Most European navigators reasonably concluded that a westward voyage from Europe to Asia was not feasible. Though Columbus was wrong about the number of degrees of longitude that separates Europe from the Far East and about the distance that each degree represented, he did possess valuable knowledge about the trade winds, which would prove to be the key to his successful navigation of the Atlantic Ocean. During his first voyage in 1492, the brisk trade winds from the east, commonly called "easterlies", propelled Columbus's fleet for five weeks, from the Canary Islands to The Bahamas. The precise first land sighting and landing point was San Salvador Island. To return to Spain against this prevailing wind would have required several months of an arduous sailing technique, called beating, during which food and drinkable water would probably have been exhausted. Instead, Columbus returned home by following the curving trade winds north-eastward to the middle latitudes of the North Atlantic, where he was able to catch the "westerlies" that blow eastward to the coast of Western Europe. There, in turn, the winds curve southward towards the Iberian Peninsula. Columbus' knowledge of the Atlantic wind patterns was, however, imperfect at the time of his first voyage. By sailing due west from the Canary Islands during hurricane season, skirting the so-called horse latitudes of the mid-Atlantic, Columbus risked either being becalmed or running into a tropical cyclone, both of which, by chance, he avoided. Initially, in 1485, Columbus had presented his plans to find a westward route to Asia to King John II of Portugal. He proposed that the king equip three sturdy ships and grant Columbus one year's time to sail out into the Atlantic, search for a western route to the Orient and return. Columbus also requested he be made "Great Admiral of the Ocean", appointed governor of any and all lands he discovered and given one-tenth of all revenue from those lands. The king submitted Columbus' proposal to his experts, who rejected it. It was their considered opinion that Columbus' estimation of a travel distance of 2,400 miles (3,860 km) was, in fact, far too low. Columbus sought support from both Genoa and Venice but he received encouragement from neither. He had also dispatched his brother Bartholomew to the court of Henry VII of England to inquire whether the English crown might sponsor his expedition but also without success. Columbus asked for an audience with Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, who had united the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula by marrying and ruling together. Throughout his life, Columbus also showed a keen interest in the Bible and in Biblical prophecies, often quoting biblical texts in his letters and logs. When he sought their support for his proposed expedition to reach the Indies by sailing west, his plan was based on his reading of the Second Book of Esdras (Ezra): 6:42, which he took to mean that the Earth is made of six parts of land to one of water. Towards the end of his life, he produced a Book of Prophecies in which his career as an explorer is interpreted in the light of Christian eschatology. Possibly, more appealingly, in the records of his voyages Columbus often wrote about acquiring the precious metal (gold) “in such quantity that the sovereigns… will undertake and prepare to conquer the 'Holy Sepulchre' - i.e. regain Jerusalem from Islam. On 1 May 1486, Columbus presented his plans to Queen Isabella, who referred it to a committee. Eventually, the committee, like their counterparts in Portugal, replied that Columbus had grossly underestimated the distance to Asia. They pronounced the idea impractical and advised the Royal Monarchs to reject the proposed venture. However, to keep Columbus from taking his ideas elsewhere and perhaps to keep their options open, Isabella and Ferdinand gave him an annual allowance of 12,000 maravedis and, in 1489, furnished him with a letter ordering all cities and towns under their domain to provide him food and lodging at no cost. The Spanish Monarchs, waging an expensive war in the Iberian Peninsula to expel the Moors, were eager to obtain an advantage over other European countries in the quest for trade with the Indies. Columbus's project, though far-fetched, held some promise of such an advantage. After continually lobbying at the Spanish court and two years of negotiations, he finally had success in January 1492. Ferdinand and Isabella had just conquered Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula, and they received Columbus in Córdoba, in the Alcázar castle. Isabella turned him down on the advice of her confessor, but as Columbus was leaving town by mule in despair Ferdinand intervened. Isabella then sent a royal guard to fetch him, and Ferdinand later claimed credit for being "the principal cause why those islands were discovered". In the April 1492 "Capitulations of Santa Fe", King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella promised Columbus that if he succeeded he would be given the rank of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and appointed Viceroy and Governor of all the new lands he could claim for Spain. He had the right to nominate three persons, from whom the sovereigns would choose one, for any office in the new lands. He would be entitled to 10 percent of all the revenues from the new lands in perpetuity. Additionally, he would also have the option of buying one-eighth interest in any commercial venture with the new lands and receive one-eighth of the profits. However, Columbus was arrested in 1500 and dismissed from his posts. He and his sons, Diego and Fernando, then conducted a lengthy series of court cases against the Castilian crown, known as the ‘pleitos colombinos’, alleging that the Crown had illegally renéged on its contractual obligations to Columbus and his heirs. The Columbus family had some success in their first litigation, as a judgment of 1511 confirmed Diego's position as Viceroy, but with reduced powers. Diego resumed litigation in 1512, which lasted until 1536, and the disputes would continue until 1790. However, between 1492 and 1503, Columbus completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Americas, each voyage being sponsored by the Crown of Castile.