Christopher Columbus, the Last Templar

Was Columbus a Templar? According to the historic documents and maps revealed by Ruggero Marino, Columbus shared the Templar dream of Christians, Muslims, and Jews living in peace in a New Jerusalem, and his voyage across the Atlantic was both to find a new passage to Asia and to find the place where the New Jerusalem could be built.

Marino draws parallels between Marco Polo’s journey east over the Silk Road and Columbus’s sea voyages and reveals that Columbus studied ancient texts and maps from the Vatican Library, access to which was granted by Pope Innocent VIII--whom Marino shows to be Columbus’s true father. Innocent VIII (whose own father was Jewish and grandmother was Muslim) was the perfect individual to further the Templars’ plan to create a universal religion combining the spiritual wisdom of the three faiths. Marino shows that Innocent’s “disappearance” and the story that Columbus merely stumbled onto the New World were part of a calculated political and theological cover-up. While King Ferdinand (the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince) and Queen Isabella of Spain are heralded with funding Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was Innocent VIII who was the main sponsor and master­mind of the expedition. To obscure the purpose of the voyages, and give Spain the credit for the New World discovery, Ferdinand and his agent, Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia), Pope Innocent VIII’s successor, initiated the disinformation campaign that has lasted for over 500 years.