Would there have been avid talk in taverns among laborers and peasants, disbelief or surprise, excitement even? Or would it have been regarded as something only concerning the aristocrats and explorers?
The easy and flippant answer to this question is that nobody in the 1490s would have thought the islands described by Columbus were a "new world" at all, and they obviously weren't called the "Americas" right away. They were believed to have been islands near India and China. It wasn't until 1504 (at the absolute earliest) that the landmasses were recognized as a "New World" and 1507 for anyone to refer to them as The Americas. By then, there had been so many expeditions, papal bulls, political and economic squabbles about their nature and legal condition that they were very likely just squeezed into the fairly familiar patterns of trade and dominion as any other place in the world.
Columbus had, of course, sold his first voyage on the idea that he knew of a quicker route to the far east - India and China - than any of the routes long established by the 1490s. There were two main routes in the early 1490s: the landborne silk road and its derivative routes; and the Mediterranean trade, with ports in the Levant and Egypt being the primary trade hubs. Pacific trade was linked to the latter through a short overland route from the Red Sea to Egypt. These routes had made Mediterranean middlemen like Genoa and Venice vastly wealthy and powerful, and both controlled colonies in and around the Mediterranean and Black Seas that linked to land routes and other areas of exploitation.
Trade at this time was far from disconnected, and it was a major part of international policy, and the connections built between traders and intellectuals in Europe and Asia had a huge impact on the intellectual culture of Europe and the Humanism that was in its early stages in the 1490s. Efforts to find faster, more reliable routes to the riches of Asia were a hot topic, especially because avoiding the Mediterranean meant circumventing the Genoans, Venetians, and Ottomans, who all had a hand in the other trade routes then in use. A direct route to India controlled by a single power would make the entity in control fabulously wealthy. This was obviously important to the very powerful, the kings and their courts and the bankers that helped to sustain them, but also to middling traders and others with an eye for personal advantage in blazing a new and untested trail for its possibilities of profit. Modest traders or moneylenders in continental cities, as well as the students and lecturers and philosophers of continental universities, would all have an interest in new routes, new lands, new peoples, not only for personal profit but also for the more triumphant motives kids tend to be taught in school: exploration and discovery for the sake of the thing itself. These are not necessarily opposing ideas, and the mutual interest in philosophy and profit are impossible to disentangle.
So, Columbus. His first voyage was meant to find a simple westward route to Asia, and he ended up making landfall in the Bahamas, and then tracing a wending route around many of the Caribbean Islands, including Cuba and Hispaniola. By his own admission, in journals and in popularized letters written to the court of Spain and published widely in Europe, Columbus was convinced that these islands were quite close to India and China. He of course coined the term "Indians" based on that assumption, but also noted that
I have found no monsters, nor heard of any except on an island here which is the second one as you approach the Indies and which is inhabited by people who are held in all the islands to be very ferocious and who eat human flesh. These people have many canoes in which they sail around all the islands of India robbing and stealing whatever they want
He also believed that he had found rhubarb, a plant that until then had been a European import from China, further evidence that he was quite close to the Oriental spice markets that were his goal. On his way, of course, he traded gifts with native people, taking trinkets and jewelry - some of gold - and other goods, and kidnapping dozens of people as well, whom he took back to Europe on his return voyage in January.
He wrote several letters before even making landfall detailing all of his discoveries, both proving that the islands he did find would be profitable to exploit and also that they were indeed a gateway to the Orient as he had suspected all along. The rush to exploit these is complicated, but it's notable that the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which demarcated the new discoveries along a pole-to-pole line with Spain taking lands west and Portugal lands east, implicitly supported the idea that India was quite close (and reserved for Spanish exploitation).
But around the same time as Columbus found the "Indies" the Portuguese were finding usable routes southward along the African coast, and in 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern coast of Africa and made it to India and returned, meaning that within five years of each other, both a western and eastern route was said to have made it to the Orient. These new routes were understood as new ways to get at desired goods, even if some of the particular discoveries - especially gold - were shuffled into patterns of political control quite quickly.
Amerigo Vespucci's journeys were widely published in the first years of the 16th century, and it was their popularity that led to the change from Columbus "Indies" being just a gateway to India to evidence of an entirely new landmass. Prior to this, the intellectual culture of Europe had divided the world into three landmasses: Europe, Asia, and Africa. This new division was partly a consequence of further and larger expeditions by Spain and Portugal to the West Indies and South America and along the African route to India: expeditions returning from the west came with very little in terms of goods or peoples or descriptions of those that came back from the eastern route, and more and more the suspicion was that Columbus had erred in his assertions that he was anywhere near India. Following along quite closely was the publication of Martin Waldseemüller's map of the world, which was the first to depict the new landmass as one wholly separate from the three traditional continents.
It's hard to speculate on what a typical person might read and hear and believe about the discoveries, but it's hard to argue with the fact that both efforts wrought extreme changes in trade and politics in European powers, as many scrambled to dominate the new possibilities in trade and exploitation. Whole industries were formed, national economies were realigned, and those interested in the science and philosophy of the natural world had vastly more opportunities for theory crafting and experimentation.
I'll tackle the reception of the news of Columbus's discovery in France. This is mostly based on Roux, 2018.
On 15 February 1493, while still aboard of the Niña, Columbus wrote a letter containing a short account of his voyage. This letter was printed as soon as it was received in Barcelona, and translated into Latin in Rome at the end of April (De insulis nuper inventis). By the end of 1493, than eight editions had appeared and been distributed throughout Europe (chart of the distribution). In Paris, nothing less than three editions were printed, based on the Latin version, and all were published before July 1493 (Roux, 2018). In 15th century France, the dissemination of news by means of handwritten copies of letters relating major events was commonplace, and the printing press greatly increased the audience for these texts (Seguin, 1956). The speedy dissemination of Columbus' letter is thus unsurprising.
Guyot Marchant, the French printer of the Admiral's letter, was a successful printer of popular illustrated books, known for a Danse Macabre (1485) and The Compost and kalendrier des bergiers (Shepherd's calendar, 1491), both written in vernacular and reprinted multiple times (Hindman, 1991). The fact that Marchant, who knew his readers very well, chose to print Columbus' letter in a hurry (all three editions came within weeks) shows that there was a strong interest for this letter from the (reading) public, even though it was written in Latin. Marchant recycled a woodcut used in his Shepherd's Calendar that showed an angel proclaiming the glory of the newborn Christ to shepherds. For Roux, this shows that Marchant suggested to his readers that, like the shepherds from the Gospel, they were privileged witnesses to a special announcement (Roux, 2018).
In addition, Columbus' letter was not just news. It also contained a part of exciting fantasy, and can be linked to exotic fantasy tales about far away lands, popular at the time, such as the Letter of Prester John, the legendary Christian patriarch. Another fantasy published in Paris in 1495, Nouvelles admirables..., while completely imaginary (it includes half-white, half-black women with two testicles, among other creatures), seems to borrow from Columbus' letter (Roux, 2018).
Assessing the reception and audience of the letter remains speculative. Seguin, writing about those types of "occasionals", writes that their relatively poor physical and editorial quality suggests that they were cheap and made for quick consumption. But only a small elite could read, and Columbus's letter was in Latin, rather than in vernacular. Seguin supposes that those books were bought by people from the little bourgeoisie, merchants, monks, officers etc. and that those people read the books to those around them who could not read, including neighbours and domestics (Seguin, 1957). Roger Chartier also considers that
written materials lay at the very heart of the culture of the illiterate and were present in rituals, public spaces, and the work place. Thanks to speech, which deciphered writing, and to the image, which mirrored it, written matter was made accessible even to those who were incapable of reading it or who, left to their own devices, would have had only a rudimentary comprehension of it (Chartier, 1994).
Likewise, it has been suggested the translation in versified Italian by theologian Giuliano Dati (La Lettera dell' Isole che ha Trovato Nuovamente il Re di Spagna. Poemetto in Ottava Rima), also from 1493, was sung in the streets (Fournier, 1856).
So Columbus's short letter, primarily disseminated to an eager but limited circle of readers, may have found a much larger audience of non-readers, who would have enjoyed its contents not some much as the story of a true discovery (lacking the knowledge to understand and contextualize it, unlike those in power in the European courts), but as wondrous tale, part news, part fantasy, and indeed possibly discussed avidly in taverns. But, as note Bennassar & Bennassar, it would take about thirty years for the general public to actually understand what had happened (Bennassar & Bennassar, 1991).
Sources
Hello everyone,
If you are a first time visitor, welcome! This thread is trending high right now and getting a lot of attention, but it is important to remember those upvotes represent interest in the question itself, and it can often take time for a good answer to be written. The mission of /r/AskHistorians is to provide users with in-depth and comprehensive responses, and our rules are intended to facilitate that purpose. We remove comments which don't follow them for reasons including unfounded speculation, shallowness, and of course, inaccuracy. Making comments asking about the removed comments simply compounds this issue. So please, before you try your hand at posting, check out the rules, as we don't want to have to warn you further.
Of the fifty comments that Reddit says are present at the time of this post,
Of course, we know that it can be frustrating to come in here from your frontpage or /r/all and see only [removed], but we thank you for your patience. If you want to be reminded to come check back later, or simply find other great content to read while you wait, this thread provides a guide to a number of ways to do so, including the RemindMeBot- Click Here to Subscribe - or our Twitter.
Finally, while we always appreciate feedback, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with META conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to modmail, or a META thread. Thank you!
