15. India Est Prope Hispania

Reproduced here magnified, are some of the notes that Christopher Columbus used to write on the books he read in Spain. He was looking for arguments to convince men of culture and power that his intuition was correct: there was a great land beyond the Atlantic, until that time known as the Dark Sea, and so, as there were three continents, Asia had to be closer to Europe than Ptolemaic geography claimed. The originals of the notes are to be found in the Colombina Library of Seville