Wladislaw III – Father of Columbus

Seal of Wladislaw III (reign 1434-144)

Earlier (2-December-2010 post), you may remember this jester writing about Columbus’ Polish roots.  This was from AOL News reporting on a press release put out by the researcher/author Manuel Rosa here.  Columbus’ Polish father, Wladislaw III reigned from 1434-1444. You can find many of the seals of the Polish Kings at AGAD .  From another blog (Never Yet Melted), which did a very nice review of the story, one of the arguments (besides genealogy, access to royalty, etc.) included a comparison of heraldic seals.

At the left is the actual seal. Only by close examination of the image can I make out the Royal Eagle (of Poland) in upper left quad of the shield and a horse-figure in upper right quad. I cannot quite tease the details for the two lower quadrants from the seal image.

If you compare to Columbus’ (aka Cristobal Colon) heraldic symbol, you can see four quadrants, but I cannot see a resemblance to Wladyslaw III’s seal. A recreation of Wladylsaw III’s seal is here. This bears 4 of 7 elements from his father’s seal. Interesting is that two of the remaining three elements appear in Columbus’s heraldic symbol (if we allow the horizontal bars are represented by the side-wise anchors in Columbus’ symbol).

Stanczyk will just have to wait for the book to come out (in English) or the National Geographic video to make up his mind in total on this matter.  The book (in Spanish) can be purchased from Amazon. I hope an English translation is forthcoming. The comments so far of those who read the Spanish book say the Rosa arguments are persuasive and compelling.