Christopher Columbus

1451 – 1506

Christopher Columbus was an Italian-born navigator who completed four Spanish-financed transatlantic voyages between 1492 and 1502, opening the way for sustained European colonization of the Americas. As governor of the colony at Hispaniola from 1492 to 1500 he authorized the enslavement, mutilation, and mass killing of the Taíno people of the Caribbean—a regime so brutal that even his Spanish contemporaries arrested him and stripped him of his colonial titles in 1500. The Indigenous population of Hispaniola, estimated at hundreds of thousands at first contact, was effectively annihilated within a generation of his arrival.

Last checked: May 10, 2026, 1:06 PM