It’s A Holiday
It’s the second Monday in October, so it is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Have a happy one.
The US Federal government has decided to call it Columbus Day, even though it should be the 12th of October which was the second Wednesday in 1492. But it’s okay that the holiday is on the wrong day, because Christopher Columbus [AKA: Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón] didn’t find what he was looking for and identified what he did find incorrectly. The important thing is that a large area of the map got changed from “here be dragons and sea serpents,” to “here be gold and cannibals” and no mention was made of the oppressive heat, mosquitoes, or hurricanes.
It’s a big day for Italians in the US, even though Colombo was Genoese, not Italian, as there was no Italy until just before the American Civil War.
But, hey, holidays are all about frauds and misconceptions in furtherance of a day off. In 1492 Isabel la Católica, Queen Regnant of Castile and Leon; Queen Consort of Aragon, Majorca, Naples and Valencia; Countess Consort of Barcelona, was more concerned to ridding her realm of non-Catholics, and had a “whatever” attitude about Cristóbal Colón. Her support amounted to a piece of paper telling people to supply him with men and ships out of their own pockets, not her treasury.
So while Chris sailed the “ocean blue”, ‘Bel and Ferd with the Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada as the first Inquisitor General, pursued a policy of “religious cleansing” which provided important material for Monty Python.
We end up on a landmass named for a Florentine employee of the de Medici family, because a Freiburger [there was no Germany until 1870] cartographer read a probably bogus book of letters. OTOH, you have to give Vespucci points for figuring out that he probably wasn’t in Asia.
4 comments
“Religious cleansing”: is that what I see on the horizon here in today’s United States? There certainly seem to be enough people motivated toward “an establishment of religion,” somehow always their own religion and their own flavor of it…
Today’s Freiburg has a truly excellent baroque orchestra, in which one of my former colleagues has played for over three decades now. They can be viewed and heard on YouTube; search for “Freiburger Barockorchester” and pick a track by your favorite composer.
‘Bel has certainly had a PR makeover from the whacked out religious zealot that she was, which led to a Spanish Empire that built nothing and eventually collapsed of internal rot with the US supplying the final push.
Yes, the blatant moves to impose the Christianist view on the US is a disease that breaks out every few decades. It is in its downward spiral, kept aloft by the hot air of politicians and the media who are too afraid to oppose it.
“Her support amounted to a piece of paper telling people to supply him with men and ships out of their own pockets, not her treasury.”
yay for public-private partnerships! 😉
The story was always that ‘Bel paid for it, but the documents in the Spanish archives clearly show that she had a ‘Whatever’ attitude about the whole thing until it looked like it might generate some real cash.
I doubt the people who actually put up the money even got tax credits, much less any return on the investment.