INH (English Version)

It is known that Christopher Columbus wrote a letter to the Khaghan of China. This, by itself, already connects Catalonia with the discovery of the Americas, considering that Columbus was a figure linked to the Catalan court. I explain the reason in this article. At the Institut Nova Història (INH) Symposium, in 2005, I spoke about the introduction of gunpowder to the West Europe through Catalonia. This argument is evident for many reasons that I detailed, including the large number of Catalan terms in the Spanish lexicon related to the world of weapons. So much so that even the most important concepts in this field, such as "pólvora" (gunpowder in spanish castilian) and "salitre" (saltpeter in spanish castilian), come directly from Catalan language. I also explained that there is documentary evidence that King Jaume I (James I of Aragon) used gunpowder in the conquest of Valencia and that in the Museum of the "Royal Armory of Madrid," there are some very ...

Today, there is no one who claims to be knowledgeable in the field who does not recognize the importance of Catalan cartographers, most of them Jews from Mallorca, such as Abraham Cresques and Jafuda Cresques, cartographers and compass makers, co-authors of the Atlas Català (Catalan Atlas), a work from 1375, etc. The big problem we encounter is that the "scientific English" of the time was Latin, and since the maps were written in Latin, some Italian scholars have wanted to claim the authorship of many of these documents. For these gentlemen, Petrus Rosselli was −of course!− Italian. However, I know a couple of Catalan Peres Rossell from the same period. In this particular case of Petrus Rosselli we were lucky, because there was another portolan, with the same style, in which it read: "Petrus Rosselli me fecit ab Majoricarum Insulae". And it was possible to establish that he was Catalan from Mallorca (Balearic Islands). Another case of appropriation of Catalan carto...

  The study of the true personality of Christopher Columbus (Cristòfol Colom, in Catalan) has revealed a series of biographical details about the protagonist that precisely match the biography of a Catalan noble named Joan Colom y Bertran, from the Colom family of Barcelona, an ancient Catalan lineage with a considerable number of highly prominent figures linked to the history of Catalonia in the 14th and 15th centuries. The following table shows a list of the parallels between the official figure and the Catalan noble, well-documented in the archives of the Late Middle Ages. Christopher Columbus (genoese) Joan Cristòfol Colom i Bertran (catalan) 1 Has an heir son named Diego 1 Has an heir son named Jaume 2 Has a cleric brother named Diego 2 Has a cleric brother named Jaume 3 Has a brother named Lluís (Synod of Sto. Domingo, second half of the 17th century) 3 Has a brother named Lluís 4 Named Margarita Island because his wife was named Margarita (J. López de Velasco) 4 His first wi...