re: Columbus and Nationality (Alice Whealey, US)

Alice Whealey responds to Hernán Grimberg’s post of 24 October:

Since Corsica was part of the city state of Genoa in 1492 (Genoa had ruled Corsica since the 14th c. after seizing it from Pisa), it is possible for Columbus to have been both Corsican and Genoese. Pre-modern Italian city states sometimes included even more far-flung maritime possessions. In the late medieval period the Genoese also ruled some parts of the erstwhile Byzantine Empire. Las Casas says that Columbus was born in “some place or other in the ‘provincia’ of Genoa,” which does not necessarily mean the city of Genoa itself. The “provincia” could conceivably have included Corsica. All of which indicates how anachronistic it is to think of modern nationality when speaking of Columbus’s–or any other early modern European person’s–so-called “nationality” (a point Guity Nashat was also trying to make on 27 October, I think).