CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS occupies a place of primacy in the American pantheon, yet little is known about his driving motivation - and its significance for the challenge that America faces today. Columbus, as every American schoolchild knows, was on the make for gold, spices, commercial routes to “India,’’ whatever that was. All true. But none of that touches what mattered most to the man himself (as I learned from the historian Carol Delaney) - which was a spiritual purpose.
Chief sponsor of a narrowly “secular’’ assessment of Columbus was his most important 20th-century biographer, Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison. “My main concern is with the Columbus of action, the Discoverer,’’ Morison openly declared. “I am content to leave his ‘psychology,’ his ‘motivation’ and all that to others.’’ Yet even Morison, aware as he was of what Columbus wrote in his voluminous “Journals,’’ had no choice but to acknowledge “all that.’’
Morison wrote, “Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory, and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: expansion.’’ Morison was put off by Columbus’s own self-proclaimed ambition, which was the old Crusader ambition of recapturing for Christianity the place where Jesus had walked, especially Jerusalem. “If the Turk could not be pried loose from the Holy Sepulcher by ordinary means,’’ Morison summarized, “let Europe seek new means overseas; and he, Christopher the Christ-bearer, would be the humble yet proud instrument of Europe’s regeneration.’’
Regeneration presumed the banishment of both Jews and Muslims - the 1492 purification of the Christian realms. That his departure was simultaneous to the expulsion of the unbelievers had significance for Columbus, who later wrote, in his report to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, “And thus, having expelled all the Jews from all your kingdoms and dominions . . . Your Highnesses commanded me that I should go to the said parts of India.’’
The word “India’’ had an imprecise meaning in Europe, with its main connotation being the realms that lie to the east beyond those controlled by Muslims. Achieving those realms by going west defined Columbus’s purpose - and the freedom from Islamic control was the point.
Yes, Columbus wanted to circumvent the Muslim chokehold on European trade with the East, the glories of which had been sung by Marco Polo. And he wanted to enrich his sponsors with gold and spices. But picking up the thread of Crusader attempts to retake Jerusalem was even more to the point.
In his “Journals,’’ Columbus’s report to his royal sponsors, he declares; “Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian Faith and the propagation thereof, and enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies, resolved to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India, to see the said princes and peoples and lands and the disposition of them and of all, and the manner in which may be undertaken their conversion to our Holy Faith, and ordained that I should not go by land (the usual way) to the Orient, but by the route of the Occident, by which no one to this day knows for sure that anyone has gone.’’
As for the gold that Columbus hoped to find for his sponsors, he knew that it was not merely for their enrichment. He wrote, “I declared to Your Highnesses that all the gain of this my Enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem; and Your Highnesses smiled and said that it pleased you.’’
For Columbus, achieving Jerusalem was not merely a matter of releasing the Holy Sepulcher from the age-old Muslim bondage. Like millennialists before and after him, he seems to have believed that the final restoration of the Holy Land to Christian dominion would usher in the Messianic Age. “God made me the messenger of the New Heaven and the New Earth,’’ he wrote in about 1500, “of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John . . . and he showed me the spot where to find it.’’ An apocalyptic impulse informed the New World project at its birth; the project assumed hostility to Islam; and its ultimate purpose involved Jerusalem. Those three facts remain pillars of the American problem today.
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
