ABSTRACT
For Columbus, the apocalypse consisted of three key features: the appearance of the Last World Emperor, the reconquest of Jerusalem and the return to Earthly Paradise. While authorizing Columbus's voyage to the East via the west, the monarchs also authorized him to explore the various islands of the East, where many traditions, myths and theories located Eden. To suggest, however, that this means that Isabella and Ferdinand sent Columbus to find Earthly Paradise is enormously speculative even if a navigator such as Columbus would have been aware of such theories. Although some prophetic traditions placed Earthly Paradise in the southern hemisphere, the antipodes were generally considered uninhabitable. Significantly, the Commedia locates Earthly Paradise precisely where geographers had hypothesized that humans could not survive, that is in the antipodes, the southern hemisphere, on a mountain antipodal to Jerusalem.
