Tea at Trianon: Why Columbus Sailed West

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Why Columbus Sailed West

From The Western Spirit:

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic with three ships, hoping to find a new route to Asia, but instead reached the Caribbean and began a new chapter in the history of Europe and the Americas. What many people do not realize is that his voyage was connected to the centuries-long conflict between Christian Europe and the Muslim world that controlled trade routes to the East. For generations, European merchants depended on trade networks that connected the Mediterranean with the wealthy markets of Asia, but many of these routes passed through territories controlled by Muslim rulers, who profited from the trade.
Then, in 1453, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, bringing the ancient Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire under Muslim rule and strengthening Ottoman control over trade in the eastern Mediterranean. European rulers already had good reasons to search for alternative routes to Asia, and the growing power of the Ottomans made the prospect even more attractive. While the Portuguese explored the possibility of sailing around Africa, Columbus proposed something much more ambitious: reaching Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic.
The rulers who eventually agreed to finance his expedition were Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, who had just completed the Reconquista by capturing Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, in January 1492. (Read more.)