An Italian navigator named Giovanni Caboto (anglicized as John Cabot), born probably in Genoa, had become a citizen of Venice in 1476 and had traveled widely in the Mediterranean before moving to England in 1495 with his family, including his son Sebastian.
Backed by Bristol merchants and letters patent from England’s King Henry VII, who promotes a commercial alliance with the Netherlands in competition with the Spanish and Portuguese claims sanctioned by the pope.
Like other Italian explorers, including Christopher Columbus, Cabot will lead an expedition on commission to another European nation, in his case, England.
Cabot plans to depart to the west from a northerly latitude where the longitudes are much closer together, and where, as a result, the voyage will be much shorter.
He still has an expectation of finding a route to China.
Historians had thought that, on arrival in England, Cabot went to Bristol, a major maritime center, to seek financial backers.
This is the only English city to have had a prior history of undertaking exploratory expeditions into the Atlantic.
Cabot's royal patent (issued by the Crown in 1496) states that all expeditions should be undertaken from Bristol, so his primary financial supporters likely are based in this city.
In the late twentieth century, British historian Alwyn Ruddock claimed to have found documentation that Cabot went first to London, where he received some financial backing from its Italian community.
She suggested one patron was Fr.
Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, an Augustinian friar who was also the deputy to Adriano Castellesi, the papal tax collector.
Dr Ruddock suggested that Carbonariis accompanied Cabot's 1498 expedition.
She also suggested that the friar, on good terms with the King, introduced the explorer to King Henry VII.
Beyond this, Ruddock claimed that Cabot received a loan from an Italian banking house in London.
As Ruddock ordered the destruction of all her research notes on her death in 2005, scholars have had to duplicate her research and rediscover documents.
The Cabot Project was formed at the University of Bristol in 2009 to research Cabot and the Bristol expeditions.
Dr. Francesco Guidi Bruscoli of the University of Florence found documentation that Cabot received money in March 1496 from the Bardi family banking firm of Florence.
The bankers located in London provided fifty nobles (£16 13s.
4d.)
to support Cabot's expedition to "go and find the new land".
This payment from the Florentine merchants would have represented a substantial contribution, although it was not enough to completely finance the expedition.
On March 5, 1496 Henry VII gives Cabot and his three sons letters patent with the following charge for exploration:
...free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea, under our banners, flags and ensigns, with five ships or vessels of whatsoever burden and quality they may be, and with so many and with such mariners and men as they may wish to take with them in the said ships, at their own proper costs and charges, to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.
Those who received such patents have the right to assign them to third parties for execution.
His sons are believed to have still been minors.
