U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency typically focused on carrying out immigration laws inside the country, announced Thursday it had delivered a recently discovered copy of a letter Christopher Columbus wrote in 1493 back to the Vatican Library.
Callista Gingrich, U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, brought the letter to the Vatican for a repatriation ceremony Thursday.
“The Columbus Letter, written in 1493, is a priceless piece of cultural history. I am honored to return this remarkable letter to the Vatican Library — its rightful owner,” Gingrich said in a statement.
David Weiss, U.S. attorney in Delaware, said the event marked the third time in two years that ICE and his office have partnered to return other copies of these rare letters.
The return of the document — estimated in 2004 to be worth $875,000 — has been years in the making since it went missing decades ago.
In 1921, the superior general of the Society of Jesus gave the Vatican Library what would now be a 500-year-old, Latin-transcribed copy of a letter Columbus had written to Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella about his impressions of the Caribbean. Only some of the 80 copies that were translated at the time are known to still exist, including this one.
At some point after 1934, the letter was stolen and switched out with a fake copy.
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations agency was tipped off in 2011 by a researcher at the Vatican Library who said the current copy was likely forged. Agents based in Philadelphia and the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware then untertook a seven-year effort to recover the letter.
Federal agents were able to trace the original letter to Robert Parsons, an actuary in Atlanta. Parsons told them he had bought it from a rare book dealer in New York in 2004.
Parsons agreed in April 2017 to turn over the letter so that it could be inspected for authentication purposes. The letter was determined to be real and the owner turned it over to the government so that it could be repatriated to the Vatican Library.
