Watching events in Granada that day was a Genoese adventurer called Cristoforo Colombo—or, as he is usually known today, Christopher Columbus.39 He had been in and around the Iberian Peninsula for nearly twenty years, having moved to Lisbon in the 1470s. In that time Columbus had turned himself into a regular Atlantic sea dog, sailing back and forth to the new Portuguese island outposts in the Azores and Madeira, and venturing farther still—far along the Guinea coast and (so he claimed) up into the North Atlantic as far as Iceland.
