> Though the modern state of Italy had yet to be established, the Latin equivalent of the term Italian had been in use for natives of the region since antiquity; most scholars believe Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa.
"Antiquity" meaning the time of Augustus. By then the Romans had conquered all of the Italian peninsula, including the area in the southern-most tip the Greeks called "Italia."
Referring to the people of the peninsula as "Italian" dates from medieval times, not ancient. In Columbus' time the Genoese, the Venetians, the Sardinians, etc. would not have referred to themselves as Italian, as that Roman term for a province (not a single people) had fallen away with the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier.
At this point we’re just arguing semantics. Do we mean to refer to the geographic Italian peninsula? The Roman province called Italia? The peoples and cultures collectively called Italian? The medieval or Renaissance definitions of Italian? The modern nation-state called Italy?
Historians mostly agree that Columbus came from Genoa — then an independent principality among many others that eventually coalesced into Italy the nation state. But Columbus lived in Portugal and Spain and married a Portuguese woman, obtaining Portuguese citizenship. And he spoke fluent Castilian Spanish. We don’t know how Columbus identified his nationality, but when he got funding from the Spanish crown he did so as a subject of Spain, not of Genoa or Portugal.
I think the original point, nit-picking really, intended to point out that Columbus and the modern nation-state called Italy have different timelines, and “Italian” did not yet exist as a political identity at that time, though the concept of Italy as a geographic region, or Italians as a people more alike than not by culture, history, and language did exist in Columbus’ day.
Perhaps most relevant, at the time Columbus could not ask any king or queen of Italy to fund his voyage because no such kingdom existed.
Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon, who married and then defeated the Emirate of Granada in 1492, the year Columbus sailed to the New World. Spain as a nation didn't exist until then.
It existed as a unified kingdom from 1492. A kingdom occupied the same place in international relations and national identity back then that modern nation-states occupy today.
Just want to nitpick everyone. Spain, less Navarre and Portugal, would have existed as a state at that time, but probably not yet a nation, as I presume the people still saw themselves as Aragonese, etcetera, and not yet Spanish. They even spoke different dialects at the time.
Just to nitpick your nitpick, much of Spain still speaks different dialects (if not different languages entirely). So speaking Catalan is a different thing than speaking Galician, which is very different than the Basque language. There's also Andalusian and the Canarian dialect, among others I probably don't know about.
