May 20 is the 140th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar, with 225 days remaining until the end of the year (226 days remaining in leap years).
It is well known that today is 5.20, a good time to confess his love, but few people know that today is the date of Columbus's death on May 20, 1506 (the twenty-eighth day of the fourth lunar month).
Cristóboro Colón (Italian: Cristoforo Colombo) was an Italian explorer, navigator, and one of the main figures of the Age of Discovery, a pioneer of geographical discoveries. Born in the medieval Republic of Genoa (present-day northwestern Italy).
Everyone is familiar with him, we all know what he did, and what makes him famous is his bravery, confidence, and sailing from Puerto Barros, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and finally discovering the American Road.
How much will you know about his deeds?
Columbus's life was not smooth sailing, and he loved sailing adventures from an early age. Many people say that he is to prove that the earth is round, and many people do not believe him, and even regard Columbus as a charlatan, so that he chooses to take risks. This statement is wrong, in fact, in 1491, no one believed that the earth was flat. At a special Spanish review committee on The Columbus's plan, a member asked Columbus: Even if the earth is round, sailing west can reach the east and return to the port of departure, then there must be a voyage from below the earth upwards, how can the sailing ship climb up? On this question, Columbus, who was gushing and talking, could only speak. But because of the western demand for material wealth in the East at that time, in addition to the traditional silk, porcelain, tea, and the high-profit spice trade in Asia, he was eventually funded by Queen Isabella I of Spain.
When Columbus was 25 years old, in 1476, he swam to Portugal with red hair and a tall figure with the wreck of a shipwreck. In the following years, he lived in Portugal and got married and had children. Unfortunately, his young wife died soon after. Columbus, who could have continued to be a sailor on a merchant ship off the coast of Portugal, always dreamed of wealth and honor, and envisioned a mysterious place in the west.
The Book of Marco Polo was a book that Columbus liked to read as a teenager, and later he not only read it intensively, but also did research. A Latin copy of the Marco Polo Chronicle is still preserved in the Columbus Memorial in Sevier, Spain, and many columbus's eyebrows are preserved. Columbus loved reading the book not only because it was as interesting as The Night, but also because it fit his ideals as a gold-worshipper. He admired the places described in the book, and he admired the jewelry gold and silver all over China and India.
Columbus deliberately wanted to break out a route to the East, dreaming of achieving Kublai Khan's unfulfilled goals. In a letter he once said that he prayed day and night for the land of gold from God, in which he wrote: "Gold is the most precious of all commodities, gold is wealth, and whoever possesses gold will have everything he needs in the world, and at the same time he will have the means to save the soul from purgatory and to restore the soul to the pleasures of heaven." ”
In addition, Columbus's curiosity was also stirred by his extensive books and long-term sailing practice. In his diary, there is a passage like this: "I have not left the life at sea since I went to sea when I was young. This profession seems to have caused all those who do this to have a mood of wanting to know the mysteries of the world. ”
In 1476, Columbus joined a French pirate fleet. During a battle against an Italian ship, the ship he was on caught fire and sank, and he escaped by jumping into the sea, where he swam for a long time to reach Portugal. Columbus thought he could survive and arrived in Portugal was god's arrangement for him.
In portugal, the "explorer" country, Columbus learned a lot of navigation knowledge, knew how to use compasses, charts and various new navigational instruments, learned how to use the position of the sun and stars to determine the position of the ship, and participated in many ocean voyages with the ship. On one occasion, he was given an opportunity to sail to Iceland, where he continued to sail another 160 kilometers, which greatly influenced Columbus's later westward voyage.
At that time, it took a long time from Europe to Asia.
According to the Travels of The Guests of Braun, on Easter in 1245, Pope Enoch IV sent envoys, and the Franciscan priest Braun guests set out from Lyon, France, with letters from Pope Enochson IV to the Great Khan of Mongolia. Arrived at the city of Kiev, where the Mongol army was stationed. On April 4, 1246, The guests of Blanc came to Kiev, and after leaving the city of Kiev, they marched forward for more than 320 days, entering the garrison general, who sent troops to escort them all the way, and changed to the Stagecoach of the Yuan Dynasty, and after more than a month of traveling at the station, they arranged for The guests and monks accompanying him to Go to Helin to meet Emperor Dingzong Guiyu Khan, and also sent two cavalry to accompany him. At that time, the guests of Braun were physically tired, and they could not bear the hardships of riding horses, and they cried opposite the Benedictine monks when they set off. Finally arrived in Helin three months later in late July. From Lyon to Horin, the journey took a year and three months, even if it was a smooth wind, it took a year, and the horse traveled more than 5,000 kilometers.
In that period, the rise of the Ottoman Empire completely blocked the commercial land of Europe and Asia, and even if it could be walked, the tariffs it collected were extremely high, more than ten times higher than the original price.
What about water?
At that time, the waterway to Asia required bypassing the Cape of Good Hope, that is, bypassing Africa, although the main route at that time, but the whole journey took at least seven months.
Under this pressure, forced by the need for trade, countries urgently need a new route to meet the demand.
Columbus lobbied England, France, Italy, and Portugal for this purpose, but all of them were rejected, not least because Dias had discovered a road from the waterway to India, and because countries did not want to spend money to find a route that he did not say existed, and because Columbus made excessive demands, such as his demand for the title of "Commander of Navigation", 10% of the spoils of war, and demanded that the governorship of each country he found be passed on to his descendants. At first, Queen Isabella of Spain also rejected him, but she appointed a royal commission to consider Columbus's plans and decided to include Columbus in the royal offering. It was not until 6 years later, in 1492, as described below, that the approval was issued.
Finally, on August 3, 1492, Columbus, with the Spanish royal letter to the Indian monarch and the Chinese emperor, led three hundred and ten tons of sailing ships from puerto Barros in Spain out of the Atlantic Ocean and headed straight west. After 70 days and nights of arduous sailing, land was finally discovered in the early morning of October 12, 1492. Columbus thought he had reached India. The land that Columbus ascended belonged to the Bahamas in the Barbee Sea in modern Mesoamerica, for which he named it San Salvador.
On March 15, 1493, Columbus returned to Spain. After three voyages (1493-1496, 1498-1500, 1502-1504), he landed on many coasts of the Americas. Until his death in 1506, he believed he had arrived in India. Later, an Italian scholar named Amerigo, after more investigation, learned that the places columbus had arrived in were not India, but a new world that was not originally known to Westerners.
Columbus was in a period of transformation in the development of commercial capitalism and the collapse of feudalism in Europe in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and his discovery of the Americas met the urgent demands of the European bourgeoisie to plunder new wealth and develop capitalism. The discovery and colonization of the Americas promoted the formation of the world market, and a large amount of gold and silver flowed into Europe, expanding the primitive accumulation of capitalism, promoting the development of European capitalism, and accelerating the collapse of the European feudal system. At the same time, after Columbus discovered the Americas, he established a colonial slavery system in Latin America, which brought deep disasters to the Indians. But on the other hand, it also accelerated the process of development and capitalization in the Americas. In short, Columbus's voyage was the beginning of the Age of Great Navigation.
He brought endless wealth to Europe, but it dealt a devastating blow to the Indians.
When Columbus discovered the New World in 1492, there were about 10 million Indians in the United States. But by the end of the 19th century, there were fewer than 250,000 Indians left in the entire United States.
The whole war is a one-sided massacre!
Unwilling to be oppressed and exploited, the Indians rose up in resistance, and the whites carried out a bloody massacre against them. In the decades beginning in 1622, whites waged more than a dozen wars against Indians, and by the time of the American Revolutionary War, Indians in the east were nearly extinct.
In 1830, the U.S. government passed the Indian Migration Act, which moved all Indians from the east to the demarcated area, resulting in the deaths of about 4,000 Indians. In 1830, the U.S. Congress passed the Act of Expulsion of Indians, and the wanton massacre of Indians by Americans reached an unprecedented climax. Many Indian tribes and villages, after a night of no chickens and dogs, were reduced to rubble.
From the day the U.S. Army was officially formed, its First Army Corps made the elimination of Indians its first task. This bloody killing lasted for nearly a century. Nearly 1,000 wars against the Indians, large and small, were carried out, and it was not until 1890 that they were basically over.
The last American battle against the Indians took place in December 1890. The U.S. Seventh Cavalry Regiment, with about 500 cavalrymen, surrounded a group of Indians by the Wounded Knee River. Even as they had laid down their arms, they raised their guns and killed the unarmed Indians, killing at least about 500 people on the spot, including nearly 100 women and children, in what is known in history as the "Wounded Knee Massacre."
There are many, many similar examples.
As the American Historian of the West Billington put it: "This will always be a fatal stain on the chronicles of america's frontiers." ”
Yunfeng Reviews:
The evaluation of Columbus has always troubled historians, and his historical merits of opening up new shipping routes and discovering new continents with his enthusiasm and persistence have greatly influenced the course of historical development. The gradual connection of the world into a whole caused major changes in economic relations and economic systems between the countries and regions of Western Europe, triggered the price revolution, promoted the development of commodities and the primitive accumulation of capital, and laid the foundation for the subsequent industrial revolution. But it also led to the conquest of colonialism and colonial plunder, as well as the enslavement and killing of Indians.
But in any case Columbus was a great navigator, and the evaluation differed only because of his different positions, and he made an outstanding contribution to the opening of new shipping routes. Of course, he was also a colonist, and his purpose in opening up new routes was to plunder wealth.
The massacre of the Indians was of course bloody, they had no immunity to the epidemic virus, the British even gave them blankets used by smallpox patients, the American army was even more inseparable from this, the Westward Expansion of the United States and the expansion of the continent were carried out almost simultaneously, so that the brutal acts of aggression, plunder, and massacre were inevitable. Almost every group of people marching westward was marching on the bones and blood of the Indians.