This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Few historical figures are as divisive as Christopher Columbus. For some, in both Spain and the United States, he remains a great hero, an explorer who found a "new world." He is reviled by others who see him as an arrogant conqueror: the first European to enslave Indigenous Americans and the man who launched ecological destruction in the Western Hemisphere.
As a historian who writes about early encounters between Europeans, Indigenous Americans and Africans in North America, I believe it is important to recapture this period as much as we can from existing documents—including Columbus' own writings. Those texts reveal the enormous role the push to spread Christianity played in Europeans' colonial plans from the start. In my 2026 book, "Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680," I describe how Europeans' religious desires shaped the creation of American colonies that benefited conquerors, at a high cost to those they displaced or enslaved.
In the Americas, the linkage of religious purpose and the eager pursuit of glory and wealth began in 1492. Long before Columbus set sail, Europeans were already eager to expand their faith—and territory. Centuries earlier, Crusaders had ridden into the Middle East to reclaim what they saw as their Holy Land from Muslims.
That contest took place in Spain as well. Muslim armies had invaded from North Africa in the 700s, and Muslim rulers eventually governed much of the peninsula. Spanish and Portuguese leaders waged the Reconquista, a centuries-long war that concluded with the 1492 expulsion of Jews and the defeat of the last Muslim stronghold in Granada.
By then, the Portuguese had laid claim to uninhabited mid-Atlantic islands, including the Azores and Madeira. They also colonized the Canary Islands and forced local inhabitants into slavery on their plantations. In 1479, Portugal ceded control of the Canary Islands to Spain in a treaty to end a war between the two nations.
Spaniards expanded the importation of enslaved Africans to produce sugar. Columbus wanted to find the fastest way to get to the southwest Pacific to bring home exotic spices. He searched for sponsors to support his idea that Europeans could reach the Spice Islands by sailing west across the Atlantic.
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