Christopher Columbus came to believe he had been chosen by God for a mission tied to lands Europeans would later call a new world, according to his surviving letters and religious writings. His own accounts show that faith, royal expansion, and the search for wealth were closely linked from the beginning of his Atlantic voyages.
In a 1493 letter reporting his first voyage, Columbus said he took possession of islands for Spain, renamed them and credited divine help for his success. He still believed he had reached parts of Asia, even describing Cuba as possibly belonging to Cathay.
But he also wrote that Indigenous people should become Christians, support the Spanish monarchs, and help provide resources that Spain wanted.
How Columbus linked being chosen by god to a new world mission
The same letter shows how quickly conversion and conquest became connected. Columbus said he had seized Indigenous people by force so they could serve as interpreters.
He described establishing an armed settlement at La Navidad and argued that the Spanish garrison could overpower local resistance. He also promised the crown gold, spices, cotton, and “as many heathen slaves as their majesties may choose to demand.”
His religious language became even more direct in later years. After his removal as governor of Hispaniola and return to Spain in chains in 1500, Columbus wrote that “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth” and said God had shown him where to find it.
By then, he presented the voyages as evidence of a divinely assigned mission, using biblical and prophetic language to explain what he believed he had revealed.
That belief took fuller shape in the “Book of Prophecies,” assembled in the early 1500s. Columbus gathered biblical passages and other religious authorities to place his voyages inside a larger Christian history. The work linked discovery and conversion with prophecy and the recovery of Jerusalem.
Prophecy turned the voyages into a religious mission
The political consequences had already moved beyond Columbus. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued “Inter caetera,” which connected the spread of Christianity with Spanish claims to newly encountered lands. A year later, the Treaty of Tordesillas divided spheres of expansion between Spain and Portugal.
Historian Peter C. Mancall argues that Columbus’s writings show religion and conquest were intertwined from the start. The documents do not support the idea that Columbus understood in 1492 that he had found a separate American continent.
They do show that he increasingly saw himself as a divinely directed figure whose mission combined conversion, royal authority, and material gain.
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