Explorer, navigator, colonizer, Columbus, was born in 1451 between August and October, in the Republic of Genoa (Italy) to the son of a weaver, Domenico Colombo. Columbus first went to sea as a teenager, participating in several trading voyages in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. One such voyage, to the island of Khios, in modern day Greece, brought him the closest he would come to Asia. He had two sons, Diego, from his marriage with Felipa Perestrello, and Fernando, who was born out of wedlock in 1488 with Beatriz Enriquez de Arana.
Europe had long enjoyed a safe land passage to China and India— sources of valued goods such as silk and spices. However, in 1453, the land route to Asia became more difficult. The Columbus brothers had a different idea. By the 1480s, they had developed a plan to travel to the Indies, then construed roughly as all of south and east Asia, by sailing directly west across the Atlantic Ocean.
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