The pact between Columbus and the Catholic Monarchs prior to America’s discovery on show in Barcelona

Barcelona (ACN).- An exhibition in Barcelona, with documents dating from between the 10^th century and 1493, shows the oldest preserved copy of the ‘Capitulations of Santa Fe’. This agreement was signed by the Catholic Monarchs – who ruled Castile and Aragon – in April 1492 and it accepts Christopher Columbus’ terms to undertake the trip after which Europeans would become aware of America’s existence. The document granted Columbus the titles of Admiral, Viceroy and Governor-General of all the lands he would discover and it also set that he would keep a tenth of all future profits. In fact, the document played a major role in the mid-16^th century, when Columbus’s descendants sued the Crown for not respecting the original agreement. Based on the document, a court granted the Columbus family an annual allowance – which was in place until 1898 – and several nobility titles – which are still hold by nowadays Columbus direct descendants. The ‘Capitulations of Santa Fe’, signed in the Santa Fe camp during the siege of Granada, was included in UNESCO’s ‘World Memory’ in 2009, which groups together the most transcendental documents in the history of humankind. The original document was lost and the oldest copy was made a few months after the original in order to store it. The document is only rarely on display. It has been kept in the Archives of the Aragon Crown in Barcelona for more than five centuries. This archive was created in 1318 to keep the Catalan Kings’ documents and those of their governments. Now, the ‘Capitulations of Santa Fe’ is on show along with 42 other documents displaying the symbolic conception of travelling in the Middle Ages.

The ‘Capitulations of Santa Fe or of the Admiral Christopher Columbus’ – as the original title reads – is the main attraction in the exhibition called ‘Del més enllà al Nou Món’, which can be visited at the Archives of the Aragon Crown in Barcelona. However, the other 42 documents are older, dating from between the 10^th and 15^th centuries. In fact, the exhibition is rooted in the deepest period of the world of the Middle Ages. It refers to the genesis of the first archives within the administrative organisation of the Royal Chancellery of the Aragon Crown and also to the complex historical processes by which a peripheral region such as Europe held most of the world’s power. The documents are organised into three sections: ‘From the Beyond’, ‘The Reality of the Trip’ and “Towards a New World’. They reflect the spiritual and religious conception of the world, the early colonial domination and the administrative practices of the Aragon’s Chancellery, which were quite advanced for their time.