He was talented in languages as well............
Ambitious, Columbus eventually learned Latin, Portuguese, and Castilian, and read widely about astronomy, geography, and history, including the works of
Claudius Ptolemy, Cardinal
Pierre d'Ailly's
Imago Mundi, the travels of
Marco Polo and Sir
John Mandeville,
Pliny's
Natural History, and
Pope Pius II's
Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum. According to historian
Edmund Morgan,
Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.
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