ABSTRACT

News of Columbus's successful return spread quickly. Upon his return from the first voyage, Columbus's letter to Sant'angelo (1493) was copied and disseminated throughout Western Europe as scholars, explorers, monarchs and priests scrambled to determine what Columbus's "discovery" meant. For Columbus's contemporaries with knowledge of Dante, Columbus's discovery would have confirmed the accuracy of Dante's cosmology and underlined the legitimacy of the poet's prophetic stance. But most importantly it would have legitimized Dante's paradigm as the typological model for this new apostle, Columbus. Columbus thus becomes a "type" of Dante just as Dante was a "type" of Paul and of Aeneas before him. At the same time then that contemporary cartographers confirmed Columbus's New World as the world imagined by Dante, so too did the Italian Renaissance writers confirm Columbus's voyage as the inheritor of the Dantean journey, informed in turn by the journeys of St. Paul and before him Aeneas.