Giovanni Caboto

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Caboto, historical painting by Giustino Menescardi (1762), Doge's Palace , Sala dello Scudo

Giovanni Caboto (English John Cabot , Venetian Zuan Caboto ; * around 1450 in Genoa , Gaeta or Chioggia ; † after 1498 ) was an Italian navigator . He is considered - after the Vikings in the 11th century - as the first European explorer to reach the North American mainland (1497).

Life

Venice

The house of Giovanni Caboto in Venice

Little is known about Caboto's childhood. His family name could come from the term cabotaggio , which denoted coastal shipping .

From 1461 at the latest he lived in Venice , where he applied for recognition as a citizen in 1476, which required that he had been permanently resident in the city for at least 15 years. In 1482 he married the Venetian Mattea, with whom he had three sons: Ludovico, Sebastiano and Sancio. In Chioggia and in Venice proper, he bought and sold real estate, which his descendants were still fighting over with the Venetian Council of Ten in 1551 . He was involved in the spice trade and is said to have reached Mecca . Perhaps he came up with the idea of ​​approaching the growing area of ​​the spices from the east next time. The trips to the Orient are, however, doubted by the British historian Alwyn Ruddock.

Spain

By 1490 at the latest, Caboto had to flee from Venice in debt. In a letter from 1492 he is expressly referred to as a “Venetian”. He appeared in Valencia by the middle of this year at the latest . From 1492 to 1493 he was concerned with plans for port works near Valencia, but these were rejected. During his stay in the city in April 1493, Christopher Columbus came through Valencia, who, after returning from his first voyage , traveled to Barcelona to be received by the Catholic kings . At the turn of 1493/94, Caboto was in Seville , where he was involved in a bridge construction project in the second half of 1494, which was discontinued before the end of the year. Caboto wanted to look for a shorter route further north from Europe to Cathay , as was called China in late medieval Europe following Marco Polo's travelogue . His explorations in this regard at the court of the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabella and with King John II of Portugal were unsuccessful.

England

Caboto's English letter of protection from 1496

In 1496 the sources found Caboto in England , where he was looking for a sponsor for his project to find a western route to China. In doing so he was apparently supported by the Italian community in London and in particular by Augustinian monks . In particular, the monk Fra Giovanni Antonio Carbonara (or: de Carbonariis), who was previously entrusted with diplomatic missions between King Henry VII of England and Duke Ludovico Sforza or the Holy See of Milan , is said to be interested in proselytizing the residents of the Countries that one hoped to find, have used for him.

With his help, he managed to get a letter of protection from Henry VII for himself and his three sons on March 5, 1496 : According to this, Caboto was allowed to take five ships at his own expense from Bristol to discover new land , “Which was unknown to all Christians up to that time”. In this way Heinrich tried to avoid a conflict with the Catholic Kings, because the Caribbean , which Columbus had discovered shortly before, was no longer unknown to Christians. Spain and Portugal had divided the world for colonization among themselves in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 ; it did not include expeditions by other states. Accordingly, the Spanish ambassador at the English court reported nervously to the Catholic kings in January 1496 about the arrival of "someone like Columbus" in London who was planning an undertaking "like the one to India ". Caboto was financed by a branch of the Florentine Bardi Bank in London. His financiers do not seem to have had too much confidence in Caboto's plans, because their investments were enough for the equipment instead of the five ships approved by the king for a single ship, which was rather small with a crew of around 20 men.

Replica of the Matthew that Caboto took to North America in 1497
Map with a possible course of Caboto's second trip
The Cabot Strait between Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island

Voyages of discovery

The royal letter of protection specified Bristol as the port of departure for Caboto's expedition. In 1480, seafarers of this city had managed to cross the Atlantic in search of a land they called " Brazil ". A second attempt in 1481 seems to have failed. The background to these trips was a conflict with the Hanseatic League , which had displaced the English fishermen from the profitable fishing grounds around Iceland . From here Caboto set sail in the summer of 1496. The trip was a failure because his team forced him to return by majority vote due to lack of food and bad weather. She was authorized to do this by the Rôles d'Oléron .

In May 1497, Cabot set out again from Bristol with the Matthew Caravel . In addition to a crew of 18, his son Sebastiano was on board, but he could not have been more than 13 years old at the time, which is why his participation is doubted. After 35 days of sea voyage, on June 24th he met the mainland and several islands, the southernmost of which he believed to be the mythical island of the seven cities . He went ashore once, exactly where is unknown: Several locations on the North American east coast between Labrador and Maine are possible . It was probably Newfoundland or Cape Breton Island at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River . Caboto felt that the land was inhabited because he found a path, a fireplace and a carved and brightly painted stick. For fear of meeting outnumbered indigenous people , he decided not to go into the interior of the country. So he planted the royal and papal flags on the beach and took possession of the land for England. For about a month he sailed along the Canadian coast and through the strait that was later named after him . He started the return voyage from about the point where he had disembarked and reached Brittany in fifteen days - his helmsman had taken a course too far south. On August 10, 1497, Caboto was back in Bristol. On August 23, he was received and highly honored by Henry VII in London : he was given the title of Grand Admiral , with which Columbus had also been honored, silk clothing and a reward of ten pounds sterling . He was later also given an annual pension.

The sailors raved about the large amount of fish that could be caught in the newly discovered waters, while Caboto presented a map of the world and a self-made globe , according to which he had reached far beyond the land on the Don to the land of the Great Khan . He announced that he would continue on his next trip until he reached "Cipangu | Zipangu", ie Japan . He will also ensure that London becomes more important than Alexandria for the spice trade . On February 3, 1498 he received a new privilege, after which he was allowed to sail again across the Atlantic with four or five ships this time at state expense. The ships were loaded with various textiles that were supposed to serve as the basis for the bartering that it was hoped to conduct. The Ambassador of Milan in London, Raimondo de Soncino, wrote to his duke that Caboto was also taking a few Italian monks with him who had hopes of becoming their bishops after proselytizing the indigenous population . The leader of these monks seems to have been Giovanni Antonio Carbonara, who had supported Caboto since his first arrival in England. After the fleet had set sail in May 1498, one of the ships got into distress and returned. Caboto and the crews of the other ships were not granted this, their further fate is unknown. The Italian humanist Polydor Vergil etched that the only new land that Cabot found on this trip was the seabed. Perhaps at least some of his ships reached America again, because the Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real is said to have found a broken Italian sword and Venetian silver earrings in North America in 1501. Caboto's son Sebastiano survived, he drove up the Rio de la Plata and the Paraná from 1526–1530 on behalf of the Spanish .

The British historian Alwyn Ruddock, on the other hand, believes that Caboto succeeded on his third voyage in taking possession of the entire North American coast for England; he had come to Venezuela , where he met Spanish conquistadors , and returned to England in 1500. The monks separated from the rest of the expedition and founded an abbey in Carbonear on Newfoundland - the first ever Christian settlement in North America. She bases this information on, among other things, the world map Juan de la Cosas from 1500 and a royal Spanish patent for Alonso de Ojeda from 1501, both of which suggest an English presence in this room. Ruddock died in 2005 before completing the book in which these theses wanted to make plausible. She had her notes destroyed in her will, only a sketch of the contents for her publisher has survived.

consequences

The fact that Henry VII had ignored the Treaty of Tordesillas with his commission to Caboto led to protests from his signatory powers. The Portuguese in particular were outraged because they were of the erroneous view that the areas discovered by Caboto lay east of the demarcation line and thus in their half of the world. The fact that Gaspar Corte-Real received a royal letter of protection for a trip to North America in May 1500 could be due to reports of Caboto's discoveries.

Otherwise Caboto's trips had no consequences. For a long time, his plan to find a western route to Asia found no imitators in England. According to the Italian historian Ruggiero Romano, its significance lies only in the fact that England's “vocation to world power ” was already emerging in the 15th century and not “abruptly” much later.

swell

Caboto's logbook , his other records, the world map and the globe he showed in London are lost. In addition to the two royal privileges mentioned by the voyages and June 24, 1497 as the day of discovery, there is little evidence of Caboto's landing in North America. It is worth mentioning five contemporary letters that did not come from participants in the trips: first, the letter from Lorenzo Pasquailigo, a trader residing in London, to his brother in Venice on August 23, 1497. Information on Caboto's trips to America can be found in two letters which the Milanese ambassador Raimondo de Soncino wrote to Duke Ludovico Sforza in August and December 1497. There is also a telegram from the Spanish ambassador in London, Pedro de Ayala, dated July 25, 1498. The most important source is the letter from a certain John Day, who was probably a British merchant who was secretly in Spanish service. He wrote to the "Grand Admiral" in Spain around the turn of the year 1497/98, which in all likelihood meant Columbus. The letter was only discovered in the Simancas archive in 1956 . Some of the more distant sources include a quote from the legend from Caboto's world map by the English geographer Richard Hakluyt from 1589, which mentions June 24, 1497 as the date of discovery. In an Oxford copy of his son Sebastiano's map, however, the year 1494 appears as the time of discovery.

reception

Cabot Tower in Newfoundland
The Cabot Tower in Bristol
Cabot Monument in Montréal
Cabot Monument in Bristol

In a sense, as an alternative to the Spanish discovery and conquest of southern America, Caboto was used from the beginning to support the English, later British, claim to North America, especially since he had been commissioned to take possession of all the land for England that he rediscovered. In addition, the “savages” he brought with him, who dressed in furs and ate raw meat, served as legitimation for the occupation of what was believed to be Terra nullius .

All too much was unknown about his life and his journeys. If, for example, Johann Georg Kohl believed he could infer from the dry information that he had sailed south to the heights of North Carolina , Gottlieb August Wimmer saw the southernmost point of his journey near Virginia .

The reception in Italy and in the Italian community in Canada took a completely different direction. On the one hand, the Italian community in Montreal opposed the French Jacques Cartier to an older explorer, namely Caboto. In the 1920s they enforced the construction of a statue in memory of him. For the annual celebrations on June 24th, the local fascists appeared in black shirts. With the declaration of war against fascist Italy, not only were numerous supporters of Mussolini interned, but the Italian community almost disappeared from the public eye after a few attacks. Both French and Italians insisted on their national identity and language was of great importance. That is why Filippo Salvatore regretted in a poem 1978: "Giovanni, ti hanno eretto un monumento, ma ti hanno cambiato nome, qui ti chiamano John" (Giovanni, they have erected a monument for you, but they have changed your name, here they name you John).

Others, like Giovanni Casini, erected a monument to him on the corner of Atwater and Sainte-Caterine-Strasse in Montreal . The Veneto region erected a memorial plaque in the port of Halifax in 1997 . In Edmonton , the park near the Italian community was renamed Giovanni Caboto Park and in Windsor there has been a Giovanni Caboto Club since 1925 , which in 1997 had a Caboto statue built from granite from Newfoundland.

In Italy, which initially played a major role in the conquest and colonization of America, the dispute revolved around Caboto's origins, whether he was Genoese or Venetian. For example, in 1762 the painter Giustino Menescardi (around 1720 – after 1779) saw him in his painting in traditional Venetian clothing (see picture above).

For the Canadians, Caboto was almost reinterpreted as a Newfoundland fisherman. Against this, Nova Scotia resisted , whose Historical Society had a plaque erected on Cape Breton Island , on which the landing of Caboto's "nearby" is claimed. The place has since been called Cabot's Landing .

The main belt asteroid (7317) Cabot was named in honor of the navigator.

  • Memorial plaques

  • On the 500th anniversary of Caboto's landing, the Italian province of Veneto donated this commemorative plaque with the lion of St. Mark at the port of Halifax

  • Plaque on the alleged landing site, now Cabot's Landing called

See also

It is assumed that the term cabotage goes back to him .

literature

  • Luisa D'Arienzo: Giovanni Caboto ei Caboto in terra iberica. Note sull'origine della famiglia in base a nuovi documenti. In: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Giovanni Caboto e le vie dell'Atlantico Settentrionale (Rome, September 29 to October 1, 1997), Genoa: Brigati 1999, pp. 69-82.
  • Douglas Hunter: The Race to the New World. Christopher Columbus, John Cabot and a Lost History of Discovery. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver 2012, ISBN 978-1-55365-857-3 .
  • Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, Issue 212 (2008), pp. 225-254
  • Egon Larsen (Ed.): The discovery of North America in 1497 and the expeditions to South America and the Northern Arctic Ocean. Thienemann, Edition Erdmann, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-522-61160-8 .
  • Peter Pope: The Many Landfalls of John Cabot. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1997 (The focus is on the later interpretations of Caboto's voyages of discovery).
  • RA Skelton: Cabot, John . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . tape 1: 1000-1700 . University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1979, ISBN 0-8020-3142-0 ( English , French ).
  • Maria Francesca Tiepolo : Documenti veneziani su Giovanni Caboto. In: Studi Veneziani . 15, 1973, pp. 585-597.

Web links

Commons : Giovanni Caboto  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Remarks

  1. ↑ This connection is made by William Wood: Elizabethan Sea-Dogs. 2008, p. 12 near.
  2. ^ Douglas Hunter: Race to the New World. Douglas & McIntyre 2012, p. 18.
  3. ^ Matthias Meyn, Eberhard Schmitt et al .: The great discoveries (= documents on the history of European expansion , vol. 2). CH Beck, Munich 1984, pp. 242 and 249.
  4. ^ Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, issue 212 (2008), p. 230.
  5. ^ Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, issue 212 (2008), p. 230 f.
  6. ↑ a b R. A. Skelton: Cabot (Caboto), John (Giovanni) . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1966), accessed February 8, 2019.
  7. ^ Thomas Dunbabin: Carbonariis, Giovanni Antonio de . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1966), accessed February 8, 2019; Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, No. 212 (2008), pp. 231-234; Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli: John Cabot and his Italian financiers. in: Historical Research 85, issue 229 (2012), p. 388.
  8. ↑ "which before this time were unknown to all Christians". ( online on Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website , accessed February 6, 2019), quoted from Peter Pope: The Many Landfalls of John Cabot. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1997, ISBN 978-1-4426-8169-9 , p. 14 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  9. ^ Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli: John Cabot and his Italian financiers . in: Historical Research 85, Issue 229 (2012), pp. 372-393.
  10. ↑ Urs Bitterli : The discovery of America. From Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt. CH Beck, Munich 1991, p. 150 f.
  11. ↑ The John Day Letter on the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website , accessed January 31, 2019; Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, issue 212 (2008), p. 236 f.
  12. ^ Peter Pope: The Many Landfalls of John Cabot. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1997, ISBN 978-1-4426-8169-9 , p. 15 (accessed via De Gruyter Online); Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, issue 212 (2008), p. 237 ff.
  13. ^ RA Skelton: Cabot, Sebastian . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1966), accessed February 1, 2019; Peter Pope: The Many Landfalls of John Cabot. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1997, ISBN 978-1-4426-8169-9 , p. 16 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  14. ↑ Urs Bitterli: The discovery of America. From Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt. CH Beck, Munich 1991, p. 151 f .; Peter Pope: The Many Landfalls of John Cabot. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1997, ISBN 978-1-4426-8169-9 , pp. 24-40 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  15. ↑ Urs Bitterli: The discovery of America. From Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt. CH Beck, Munich 1991, p. 152; Peter Pope: The Many Landfalls of John Cabot. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1997, ISBN 978-1-4426-8169-9 , pp. 40 ff. (Accessed via De Gruyter Online); Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, issue 212 (2008), p. 242 f .; Jean Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) - naviguateur anglais, mais d'origine Italienne on cyberacadie.com, accessed February 3, 2019.
  16. ^ A b Matthias Meyn, Eberhard Schmitt et al .: The great discoveries (= documents on the history of European expansion , vol. 2). CH Beck, Munich 1984, p. 243.
  17. ^ Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, Issue 212 (2008), pp. 225-229 and 244 ff; Jenny Higgins: Uncovering Cabot: The Ruddock Riddle , on the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website , accessed February 9, 2019.
  18. ^ Evan T. Jones: Alwyn Ruddock: 'John Cabot and the Discovery of America'. In: Historical Research 81, issue 212 (2008), p. 252 f.
  19. ↑ Urs Bitterli: The discovery of America. From Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt. CH Beck, Munich 1991, p. 152.
  20. ↑ Ruggiero Romano: The 15th Century (= Fischer World History , Vol. 12). Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1967, p. 219.
  21. ↑ The Pasqualigo Letter on the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website , accessed February 9, 2019.
  22. ↑ The Soncino Letters on the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website , accessed January 31, 2019
  23. ↑ Dispatch of Pedros de Ayala on the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website , accessed February 9, 2019.
  24. ↑ The John Day Letter on the Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Website , accessed January 31, 2019; Peter Pope: The Many Landfalls of John Cabot. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1997, ISBN 978-1-4426-8169-9 , pp. 12 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  25. ↑ A picture can be found here .
  26. ^ Johann Georg Kohl: History of the discovery of America from Columbus to Franklin. Bremen 1861, p. 225.
  27. ↑ Gottlieb August Wimmer: History of the geographical voyages of discovery on water and on land. From the oldest times to our days. Volume 4, Vienna 1888, p. 324.
  28. ↑ Joseph Pivato: Contrasts: comparative essays on Italian-Canadian writing. Montreal 1985, p. 107.
  29. ^ Giovanni Caboto Club
  30. ↑ (7317) Cabot ( English ) In: Springer Reference . Jumper. Retrieved April 9, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Caboto, Giovanni
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cabot, John (English); Caboto, Zuan (Venetian); Cabot, Jean (french)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian navigator and explorer
DATE OF BIRTH around 1450
PLACE OF BIRTH Genoa , Gaeta or Chioggia
DATE OF DEATH after 1498