Columbus lapped it up. And from his reading, combined with his personal experiences at sea, he came to two broad conclusions. The first was that there was abundant wealth across the Atlantic. If, as Ptolemy argued, the earth was a sphere, then a journey Columbus (incorrectly) reckoned at less than three thousand miles ought to bring a man to the Far East, whose dizzying riches Marco Polo and Mandeville had described at length. Columbus’s second belief was that by visiting the east he could revive the project of converting a khan or some other great eastern king to Christianity, which he
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