A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
economist.com
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I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since the Caribbean was where he wrongly thought Asia was going to be.
> the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops
In German, though, AIUI "das Milieu" usually means a different kind of environment: That of crime and shady business. "Es bewegt sich was im Milieu" is something a worried cop could say, meaning approximately "something's happening on the streets".
... which is why Native Americans have been referred to as "Indians," because Columbus was certain he'd reached the Indies.
Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
I'm more wondering about the effects of seed/life transfer. Doesn't seem feasible to me.
If you edit out 'birds', it'd be pure comedy.
But that's different, I doubt birds intentionally carry anything from Africa either.
Ok, it seems that Aristoteles believed, that birds actually transformed, but zoologist of that time at most believed, that they hibernated underwater", which seems a more solid theory, than transforming.
And as you can see, we did not in fact know that in the 18th century. Transformations are not so easy to observe directly; they often happen e.g. underground.
Not if the shape is stable, because the underlying cells are too complex to merge into something different. Cells were known already. And that insects transform is known, but birds were closely known and there was not observation of them changing drastically. So that Aristoteles had this thinking is understandable given the time, but after enlightenment, I would not expect that from the early scientists.
This is not a valid concept. Vertebrates develop from stem cells the same way insects do.
Makes me think of loons, which completely change their plumage for the winter in addition to migrating from fresh water lakes to oceanic waters. Without close study, you might not realize they're the same birds.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274193260_Has_the_m...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificent_frigatebird
[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2016.008...
I knew birds could regurgitate food (to feed their young) but this is something else…
The Portuguese settled the Azores before Columbus was born, so this sounds like a weird reason to believe India was closer.
At least that's what I recall reading awhile back. If anyone could corroborate that would be nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_slave#Europe
Unfortunately, I don't know anything about what Columbus's crews were told. It does seem they were free men (four of whom signed up in return for an amnesty) and were paid:
In the late 1400s people thought the Asian continent was larger than it is in reality. So when Columbus et co saw islands they thought they had hit Japan†… roughly where all the best maps of the day said it would be.
See Toscanelli's 1474 map, which is what Columbus was going by:
* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantic_Ocean,_Tosc...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_dal_Pozzo_Toscanelli
† Cipangu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan#Jipangu
Edgar Allen Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket details a fictional account of what might be in the Antarctic, an unexplored area in his time. We now know that Poe's imagined account is a far cry from the reality of the Antarctic continent, but he could have been "right" in that there are people living there. That doesn't really imply any knowledge of such lands though. If Poe had lived several hundreds years earlier he might have written a similar story with s/Antarctic/across the Atlantic/.
Add a few hundreds years with confusion between "fiction" (or "myth" or "legend", if you will) and "science" (a concept which didn't really exist in the first place, at least not in the same form) and things get very murky fast.
I don't think that the mere existence of the concept of "Antillia" really proves any actual knowledge; there needs to be some additional evidence; reading that Wikipedia page there doesn't seem to be any. We'll likely never know for certain if the roots of Antillia were based in reality or entirely fictional.
Which people do you mean?
> Sandy Island (sometimes labelled in French Île de Sable, and in Spanish Isla Arenosa) is a non-existent island that was charted for over a century as being located near the French territory of New Caledonia between the Chesterfield Islands and Nereus Reef in the eastern Coral Sea.[1] The island was included on many maps and nautical charts from as early as the late 19th century. It was removed from French hydrographic charts in 1974. The island gained wide media and public attention in November 2012 when the R/V Southern Surveyor, an Australian research ship,[2] passed through the area and "undiscovered" it. The island was quickly removed from many maps and data sets, including those of the National Geographic Society and Google Maps.[3]
What we did not know was an accurate way to determine longitude, specifically on a ship, until 1761. [1] [2]
Consequently, any voyage before 1761 knew its latitude exactly, but dead-reckoned its longitude.
33 days of speed-estimated dead reckoning in 1492, plus having no idea of the speed or orientation of the underlying current you're in, leaves a lot of room for error.
[0] For values of "did" that include "the correct answer had been derived and was documented (Eratosthenes, within ~2.5% in ~240 BC, working at the Library of Alexandria), but it wasn't broadly accepted as the correct answer." Thus leading to Columbus believing an incorrect value instead https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_circumference#Colu...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#H4
[2] Except via some very complicated planetary transits that were pre-calculated and could only be used as they occured. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Satelli...
It's fascinating. We are on the same track today. We know the truth but most of us jump on the same entirely wrong band wagons.
One could argue that ignoring the truth is worse than pure ignorance.
Our predecessors lived in a culture suffused with unreliable information. There weren't even "alternate" facts, because there were few accepted ones to have alternatives to.
On the one hand, we know more than they did (stronger & longer mandatory education + post-primary + informal access). On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly handle uncertainty.
Or, as I sum it all up: science should be a verb (aka process), not a noun (result).
Science could be made a verb, but like wisdom, calling something science doesn't de facto make it so.
We know that our knowledge better describes the results we reliably reproduce in the world around us.
We have knowledge about things that our ancestors did not.
If that doesn't constitute "knowing more than they did," I'm not sure what does.
We have a tendency to assume we know more than at any other time before on the basis that we know more than our rather recent ancestors.
What does that mean, if not "we know more than they did"?
But we've also made some genuine proofs. For example, we know that Fermat's last theorem is correct. That was suspected, but not known.
Yes, this applies basically to all of maths - and even to other disciplines that produce proofs. Another example: we know that one model of gravity permits black holes, wormholes, and warp drives. Sure, the model might not accurately reflect reality. But still: this is something we know nowadays, that we didn't know 105 years ago.
Not to mention all the things we collectively have done - we know it's possible to leave Earth, to live in orbit for a while, to convert sunlight directly into electricity, that it is (barely) possible to run the 100m in under 10 sec, what the earth looks like from a distance, how to make fusion bombs, how to fly... we know a lot more than folks from even the early 1900s, let alone further back.
No, we're actually (thankfully) a lot better at that than 15th Century Europe.
I wasn't picking out a local minims on either end (well, not intentionally); I was picking out the times being compared (that of Columbus vs. now) from the context of the discussion.
But really, the same applies to the whole of history from the ancient period up through and including all of the early modern period vs. say, any time from the mid-20th century on, to avoid any problems with overspecificity on either end.
Now, we know many things. Then, we did not know many things (although we perhaps believed more).
So an every-person (I'm talking generally, not only of the most scientific), plucked from a more ignorant time of history, would have a more developed method of dealing with confusion.
I don't quite buy the counter-argument (if this is yours?) that we're a more scientific society. I would have before COVID, but not now...
Vaccine efficacy and safety is one of the few things mentioned in the media as science that really is actually science.
I guess pre-COVID I would have said "Some people are ignorant." Post-COVID experience, I'd agree more with "Some people are ignorant and refuse to admit their ignorance, to the extent of cherry picking reality."
It's like expecting some people were bad at math, but getting a stack of tests back where half have multi-page essays on why numbers don't exist.
And it isn't only half idiots promoting these ideas.
Just take a look at The Craft of Writing Effectively from the university of Chicago, social science of course. You will be even more baffled, it is a hard to believe and difficult to watch lecture. Apparently these things are university approved and now watched in the millions on YouTube.
Correct. This is key to understand most of the issues at play in these past events.
He was thinking they reached India.
Same mistake today people do with Miles and Kilometer, when you are raised in one or another it is difficult to switch.
Erastothene was speaking in stadium, Columbus in Nautic miles.
The Spanish crown was motivated by greed.
Funny how those parts are also disproportioned.
(Or in less generous terms, "fraud.")
The Vikings/Norsemen had already spread awareness of Vinland to monks in Iceland, as the sagas regarding Vinland were written down about 100 years before Columbus visited Bristol. Did Columbus or other merchants in the North hear of these sagas? Did they come into contact with the written versions of these sagas?
Italian merchants had a serious incentive to find alternative trading routes.
There is a deeper question of why a man would go on a theoretically suicidal voyage, and on top of that, be funded by royalty to do so. Believing in your miscalculations is courageous I suppose, but its your life at stake; would a pious man be willing to kill himself chasing possible alternative geographic calculations?
Norse mythology talked about a land full of woodland elves who had very long life spans, that could only be reached after a journey of many months through the land of the frost giants and across a rainbow shaped bridge. Odin and Loki are said to have made this trip.
The real life explanation is probably that 2 Norseman crossed Siberia and crossed the Bering Strait to visit B.C.
The way we imagine it? An interdimensional gate leads to a spiritual realm in the sky called Asgard filled with gods (whatever the hell that means) who are immortal.
For the Spanish crown, it could have been just a matter of hedging its bets. It was a huge amount of money to one man or enterprise, but not so much to one of the great powers of Europe.
A bit like chicken of the sea. It’s not that they’re saying that tuna is a form of waterfowl, just that the two have common applications.
Also, I think Indies was used to refer to Asia in general, rather than specifically India. But am open to correction.
India is not a collection of islands, it's unlikely that Columbus mistook an archipelago for a known vast land mass.
As others have pointed out, what Columbus believed and what he said in order to acquire funding are two different things. At the time, the prospect of finding an unknown continent would have been less motivating than that of finding a new route to an area known as a source of wealth; only in retrospect is the value of the former obvious.
What Columbus (and the Greeks) did not know was the size of landmasses in proportion to each other.
They thought Europe was much, much larger than it was. Large enough to leave little room for ocean between the Azores and East Asia.
The 2 books really changed the way I view the history of the contienent, the people who were here before, my view on agriculture and disease. Just an all around great read. He does use some language I would consider politically incorrect... but it's not for ignorance. Indeed, he's clearly spent an enormous amount of effort trying best to figure out what language to use. Ultimately he concludes there weren't any good "accurate" terms that currently exist so he used what was accepted nomenclature. It does make parts hard to read though.
I would hope that as a society are not moving on a direction where people are uncomfortable hearing words they wouldn't use themselves or words which are considered incorrect in a modern context, it sounds very chilling to me.
"In May 1476, [Columbus] took part in an armed convoy sent by Genoa to carry valuable cargo to northern Europe. He probably docked in Bristol, England, and Galway, Ireland. He may have also gone to Iceland in 1477. It is known that in the autumn of 1477, he sailed on a Portuguese ship from Galway to Lisbon, where he found his brother Bartolomeo..."
A major backer of their voyages was Welshman Richard ap Meryk, sometimes elided to Ameryk. There's a theory that the fishermen established a processing station in Newfoundland and called it Ameryka in his honour, associating the left-hand side of the pond with that name in voyagers and cartographers minds.
I thought it was well established that the name America came either directly or indirectly from explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
First, what was written about areas beyond Europe's periphery tended to lag behind actual common knowledge of those areas by hundreds of years. An example would be the concept of "the torrid zone," part of an ancient Greek climatic theory that divided the world into two habitable temperate zones, two uninhabitable frigid zones (at the poles), and one uninhabitable torrid zone (basically the equatorial region). You had European textbooks being printed well into the seventeenth century describing the torrid zone's literal uninhabitability. Like, literally describing areas colonized by Europeans and integrated into European economies as unable to sustain any human life.
Second, there are many mentions in medieval European literature of pre-Columbian and, in the case of Africa, pre-Henrician explorers going beyond Europe's periphery, directly contradicting the easy school narratives most of us learned about European "discovery". E.g., the voyage of the Zeno brothers [1]. Most of these mentions are just that, mentions. The Marckalada/Markland manuscript seems notable in that it has a bit more evidentiary heft behind it, but my point is that it's not an entirely unique document.
I should add that generally speaking, there's a rich tradition in history of mercantile contact going well beyond the surviving documentary record. The ancient Romans were almost certainly in regular contact with the Indian subcontinent and possibly China through trade, even though the written record is sketchy. Archaeology has helped in this regard. Michael McCormick is the authority in this area when it comes to the early medieval period or so-called "dark ages" [2].
Edit: In history, be wary of any narrative that presupposes isolation. If you dig deep enough, you'll find that it's often written by someone long dead with an agenda. Hence medievalists' disdain for the "dark ages," which are basically an Italian Renaissance construct that got blown up by nationalist Germans in the nineteenth century.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Zeno_brothers
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Origins-European-Economy-Communicatio...
古 gǔ means ancient, like 古人 gǔrén is ancient people. You could construct phrases to mean ancient foreigners, modern immigrants, modern foreign people, etc. but I don't know of any that would carry more special meaning than equivalent phrases in English.
Though this may be less true in Taiwan; I think 洋鬼子 is fairly Maoist.
But generally you're missing the point. (1) 老外 (lao wai) is an intrinsically othering term, and (2) it's generally applied by race rather than by national origin. It doesn't matter what the literal translation is. The point is about how the word is used.
Here in California many Chinese-speaking transplants use the terms 老外 or 外國人 to refer to white Americans. I always correct them when they do--pointing out that they are the foreigners. It comes off as rude, but that's the point! No one likes to be ostracized or grouped based on the color of their skin, and that's precisely what they were doing when they used the term to refer to white people in the first place.
If I move my life to China or Taiwan, how long do I have live there before I am no longer 老外? What about my kids who grow up there, speaking at a native level and calling the country their home. Are they 老外 too?
Consistent with this, do you also insist that they refer to the USA as "中國"?
(Actually, there are several synonymous words which are opposites of 外, but in the 中国 / 外国 contrast, the opposite of 外 is obviously 中.)
中國人 is a specific term of nationality. Likewise with 美國人. But 外國人 is different—it is defined only in relation to something else, as The Other. That’s fine in the context of passport control where your nationality matters, and you need to be in the foreigner line. But it’s not okay when we all live together in the same country, speaking the same language and with our kids in the same class in school, and you still refer to me as The Foreigner. Do you see the difference?
Interestingly, A LOT of mainlanders don’t know to line up in the 外國人 line when they go through Taiwan’s passport control, and they get upset when they are told to switch. It happens literally every time I’m in the airport (at least pre-pandemic). I don’t know if this is a dialectical, cultural, or propaganda problem, but it seems related.
Your history is off; the term is very old and does not even originally refer to all of China. It's also the name of a small, non-central part of Japan.
> Interestingly, A LOT of mainlanders don’t know to line up in the 外國人 line when they go through Taiwan’s passport control, and they get upset when they are told to switch.
I think they have a point here; putting mainlanders in the 外國人 line would seem to be an explicit contravention of the One China Policy.
If it is absolutely necessary to refer to someone's exclusion for logistical (e.g. visa, legal) reasons the usual way to say it is 外國人，外籍人，外賓, the latter of which is usually the most formal and respectful.
I'm curious when and how the name might have attached itself to San Francisco, which is not near Potosí.
But the notion of trans-Atlantic voyages, the Vikings apart, seems shaky to me.
You are correct that the notion of isolation tends to be carried much too far.
Why? The distance between western europe and greenland/north america is rather small. When compared to the vast distances that polynesians have been sailing in the pacific, it's nothing.
We know that the inuit/siberians/asians have been traveling between alaska and beyond and back to siberia/asia for thousands of years. And it's almost a certainty that some northern asians knew of "north america". But it was mostly tundra/ice so people simply didn't care. Who really cares if there is more ice beyond the ice that they already knew.
What was revolutionary wasn't that columbus sailed to americas. It's something people ( asians/siberians/inuit ) have been doing for thousands of years and it's something europeans have been capable of for thousands of years. The importance of Columbus's expedition was that he showed it can be profitable or at the very least convinced the european elites of it. That's what separated columbus from the vikings, asians/inuits/siberians, vikings and other europeans who sailed to the americas. He showed there is profit in it. Of course columbus's "profit" came at the price of genocide of the natives he came across in the caribbean, but that's another topic.
Where are there megalithic cultures in Northern America? Or is this evidence of a visit to Mexico?
Any more info on the last part? I am asking because in contemporary German the term 'dark ages' is almost unheard of, whereas in English it seems to be a fairly common term.
From an English perspective it is hard to understand the disdain for the “dark ages” label. After the Romans left, people in Britain got several inches shorter and became illiterate.
they really were to their eyes.
We know more about ancient history today than people from the VII century about a 100 years before them
The invasions of the former roman empire in today's Italian territory destroyed most of the historical knowledge and gave birth to dark folk legends that are still well alive today, even though historians have debunked the myth of the middle-ages as dark times.
Edit: but revisiting worked.
Oh wait . . .
(I linked to where he's getting dismissed as a liar centuries later, but the main story about the voyage is way more interesting.)
Related literature: Chrisopher B. Krebs, "A Most Dangerous Book. Tacitus' Germania from Roman Empire to the Third Reich", W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 2011.
If real, was this work originally widely read in its time?
An unfinished and unpublished work in an era before the printing press is guaranteed to not have been widely read.
But the voyages to Vinland went from Greenland. And Greenland had a bishop who wrote to the church. And priests sent letters to each other. It is hardly surprising that one seeking to write a book on distant history and lands would have encountered information from so far afield.
Most of the bishops of Greenland never actually lived in Greenland. Certainly, the bishops never found out that the Greenland settlements had been abandoned, and bishops were appointed until 1537 despite all contact with Greenland ceasing circa 1400.
There is no reason to suspect this isn't real - it's hard to fabricate a convincing forgery of a medieval Latin manuscript. And this manuscript itself is perfectly plausible - all it's really showing is that one Italian friar somehow (perhaps via Genoese sailors) learnt about what Viking sailors already knew about the New World.
«The Cronica universalis is thought to be one of his later works, perhaps the last one, and was left unfinished and unperfected»
So I would guess only few read it. But the friar would have had the information from other sources available to him, and presumably others. The provenance of the manuscript sounds pretty solid to me.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...
The manuscript is real, it is the contents that (IMHO) are senselessly considered "real".
Besides the huge giants, where are the buildings made with huge slabs of stone in Northern America, built before 1300?
If they were so huge to be included in the characterization of this Marckalada, isn't it strange that no traces of them were found?
It is more likely that what the monk did was only to transcribe the (invented) stories and (fantastical) myths learned by this or that sailor.
The buildings had already existed for a long time when the Vikings visited. It is unlikely that they would have seen them in person, but stories could have travelled for generations over long distances.
The first pyramids in America were built 1500-2000 years before the Vikings. We are closer to the Viking age, than they were to the first stone buildings at the time. I don't think we should underestimate how far stories can travel given enough time.
Sure, but Occam's razor would probably come out with the fact that stories can be invented alright in almost no time.
Fishermen (and sailors, and more generally travelers in the ancient times) have a long tradition of fabricating (tall) stories and/or exxagerating whatever they actually had seen or had been told, think of all the various bestiaries that were common in medieval times:
Shifting to Mesoamerica, we're in the very early Postclassic--Teotihuacan has been abandoned, and Maya dominance is shifting from the Guatemalan Highlands to the Yucatan Peninsula. These cultures also built large megalithic structures.
In North America proper, 1000 correlates with the height of the Mississippian cultures, which are noted for their use of large earthen, not lithic structures. This is about when Cahokia is building Monk's Mound for example. Going further northeast across the Appalachians is difficult for me to come across firmer chronology, because the narrative is dominated by the setup of Native Americans at the time of English settlement (~1600 and later), which isn't the same as that at the time of Viking settlement (~1000-1100). Although it is worth pointing out that Viking settlement is roughly the time that the Dorset culture is being replaced by the Thule culture that makes up the modern Inuit.
As for trade routes, there are pretty well-established trade routes linking many of these places. Mexico's Pacific Coast and the US Southwest cultures seems to have pretty strong trade routes with the Andean coastline regions, and metallurgy probably diffused along that route. It's also thought that there was extensive contact between the Andean highlands and the Amazon river basin, and there are some tentative suggestions that the lineage of pottery in Mississippian and antecedent Southeastern cultures comes from the Amazon via the Caribbean. But Mesoamerica and the US Southwest are somewhat insulated from Mississippian and Southeastern cultures by large desert and semidesert regions, and most notably, corn takes an awfully long time to make its way from Mesoamerica into the eastern US, first showing up only around 1000.
I'd be more likely to point to Inuksuk [1] as a basis for large stone construction known to the Vikings than stone pyramids existing very, very remotely along the trading routes.
Giovanni = John, Giuseppe = Joseph