Pedro Madruga

What seems to have stung most was that Giustiniani had described Columbus as coming from a fairly humble origin and being someone who worked with his hands.

Defenders of the Genoese origins see a high nobleman's son embarrassed to descend from a common wool weaver, and worst of all, a merchant at that.

The first serious public challenge came from Galicia in Spain's northwest.

In 1898, Celso Garcia de la Riega, a scholar from Pontevedra, gave a lecture at Madrid's Geographical Society, arguing that Columbus was Galician.

Someone had, however, inked over faint letters to make the name stand out, perhaps a case of a scholar trying to gin up evidence that was already good as it was.

The documents were real, but a colon in Pontevedra doesn't make Columbus one of them.

In the 1970s, a researcher named Alfonso Filippo went further, proposing that Columbus was really Pedro Alvarez de Sotomayor, a ferocious local nobleman known as Pedro Madruga.

Madruga died in murky circumstances at Alba de Tormes in 1486, right around the time Columbus became a fixture at the Spanish court.