Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/284

 2 74 H. I'igiiaiid then of a different age, he would not have sworn he was at that time sixteen.' The deed of 1508, wherein Zerega, indicating his age, says " maggiore di quarant'anni ",^ and the one in which PantaHno Bavarello, the son of Columbus's sister, owns to twenty- seven years ^ have exactly the same bearing. This was the state of the question when the author of these lines published, in 1903, his essay. The Real Birtlv-Date of Columbus: 1 43 1,* an essay reproduced later in French in our Etudes Critiques,^ wherein are set forth at length the views here summarily stated, with the texts bearing thereon; whence it may be gathered that the deed of October, 1470, gives the exact age Columbus then had ; and whereby his birth is determined as coming between October 31, 1450, and October 31, 1451." But when we made this demonstration the only document then known which could efficiently support our argument was the one of 1470, and, as Columbus was still a minor in 1470, those who clung to the four-majorities theory had still a pretense for arguing ' Docuuienti, no. 68. MM. Desimoni and Lollis both admit that this deed signifies that Jacopo was then a little over sixteen years of age. - M. Desimoni, who himself gives this example, refers also to the mention of the phrase major annorum XXII. which he has found, and which, according to him, merely indicates the actual age because there existed no legal majorities of forty and of twenty-two years. Quislioni, p. 37. ^ Docuinenti, no. iii. K4 Critical Study of the Various Dates assigned to the Birth of Christopher Columbus. The Real Date 1451- ^'th a Bibliography of the Question (London, Henry Stevens, Son, and Stiles. 1903). ^Etudes Critiques sur la Vie de Colomb avanl scs Di-couvertes (Paris, Welter, 1905, pp. 544). This volume, as the colophon shows, left the printer on January 30, 1905. 6 We think it only right to repeat here, as we have already stated elsewhere, that we were not the first to seize the real significance of this document. Already in 1892 Mr. Richard Davey had called attention to it {The National Review, Lon- don, October, 1892, pp. 219, 222) ; and in that same year M. Asensio, in discussing it, had implicitly admitted that it must be construed as we have construed it, though he raised the difficulty that the Christofforus de Cohimbo filius Dominici of the deed in question may not have been our Columbus {Cristobal Colon, Barcelona, [1891], L 216). In 1900 M. Gonzalez de la Rosa boldly declared to the Americanist Congress that it followed from this document that Columbus was born in 1451 ; but we are the first who subjected this notarial act to a de- tailed critical examination, and who showed that it really means that Columbus had fully accomplished nineteen years of life in 1470. In 1904, about a year after the publication of our English memoir on this point, M. Assereto repeated the same demonstration in the article quoted below ; and, inasmuch as he does not refer to us, we must believe he had not seen our work, although it raised some discussion at the time. Our argument is summed up in pages 95-101 in the English volume and in pages 26-63 in the French. In 1902, in our Toscanclli and Colum- bus (London, Sands and Company), pp. 262-263, we had already given the re- sult of our studies on this point.