Student Question
What were the downsides of Spain's royalty sponsoring Christopher Columbus?
Quick answer:
The downsides of Spain's royalty sponsoring Columbus included the risky nature of his voyage, which many educated Europeans deemed unrealistic due to the known size of the Earth and the distance to Asia. If unsuccessful, the Spanish court risked financial loss and ridicule. Additionally, the potential benefits of a new route to Asia were uncertain. Despite these risks, Columbus unexpectedly discovered new lands, which became a major historical turning point.
The most significant "con," from Ferdinand and Isabella's standpoint, may have been the inherent riskiness of Columbus's proposed voyage. At this time (1492), only the most ignorant and superstitious of Europeans still believed the earth was "flat." Scientists knew the earth was spherical and also had theorized the approximate size of it. But given these facts, in the view of most educated people it did not seem feasible to sail westward from Europe and to reach the Asian continent. Asia was known, correctly, to be too far from Europe in that direction for a sea voyage to be possible. Columbus himself assumed that the globe was smaller than others believed and that Asia (somehow) lay only approximately 3,000 miles to the west of Europe. No one knew for certain at the time that this was not true, so the Spanish King and Queen took the gamble that Columbus might be...
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right, realizing the enormous benefit that would accrue to them if this new route to the far East were established. As it turned out, of course, there was indeed land close enough across the Atlantic to sail to, a "new" land-mass as yet unknown to the Europeans apart from the isolated Viking sailings 500 years earlier. Columbus nevertheless continued to believe, long after his initial voyage, that he had reached Asia, but the majority of European observers came quickly to realize that a different continent lay to the west, between Europe and Asia and soon christened "America" after the cartographer Vespucci.
Had the expedition of Columbus not been successful, the Spanish court would of course have squandered the money spent to finance him. The additional problem was that Ferdinand and Isabella would have become the laughing stock of Europe for having believed in what most had thought was a pie-in-the-sky venture. Columbus had already gone to the Portuguese court and been turned down. What also remained as a drawback was that even if Columbus did reach "Asia," there was no way of knowing how extensive the benefits of this new route would be. Ferdinand and Isabella had simultaneously put in motion their plan to expel all non-Christians from Spain (except, for the time, those Jews or Muslims who converted). With the defeat of the last Moorish stronghold of Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella, in their triumphant situation, were obviously more willing to take risks than might otherwise have been the case. Even so, it has to remain one of the great flukes of history that what seemed totally unrealistic to most educated Europeans of the time turned out to be a major turning-point of history.