Abstract
The beginning of Columbus' voyages to the New World coincides with the culmination of the Spanish Reconquista and carries over the latter's crusading zeal. Columbus' Diaries reveal that his empresa de las Indias had involved a master plan of contacting the Mongol and pro-Christian Grand Khan in the East, circumventing and encircling the Islamic lands of the Middle East, opening a new trade route to the East that did not have to pass through Mamluk territories and combining the forces of Western and Eastern Christendom in an enveloping movement for the recovery of Jerusalem and its casa santa. Columbus' plan followed a long tradition of Marco Polo (1295), Marino Sanudo's Liber Secretorum (1321), the life-work of Pope Pius II (1458-1465) and such writings as Campanus' Oratio (1471).
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