> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void.
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.
> 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.
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:
It's interesting how deeply wrong we were at that time, while we precedently knew all the dimensions and distance of most parts of the globe with pretty high accuracy.
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...
I guess my perspective (from watching struggles with public health & vaccine development information during early COVID-19) is that modern intellects aren't well exercised with respect to uncertainty.
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).
> Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed.
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.
History renders comparisons murky and imprecise, but my point was more contingent on the availability of quality information than behavior.
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...
We don't know more than we did. We have a strong belief that our cumulated knowledge, tools and infrastructure are leading to more accurate knowledge. We accomplish technological advancements that comfort us in the idea we know better. That's all.
Science could be made a verb, but like wisdom, calling something science doesn't de facto make it so.
We actually do know more. Sure, physics is basically modelling and observations. Our current models might be completely wrong - even if their predictive power is far greater.
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.
Yes and no. The public's (and media's) inability to differentiate between preprints, efficacy vs safety trial stages, and basic statistics boggled my mind.
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.
The effect of constructionism coupled with post modernism offering an attractive alternative to the complicated math.
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.
It's interesting that in Toscanelli's map it also appears the "Antillia"[0] island mentioned in another comment. There was definitively some knowledge of land in between, maybe they just didn't know it was a huge continent.
If you look to the west from Europe you see a vast sea. It doesn't take a great deal of effort to imagine some form of land beyond or in that sea. You would be quite a boring and unimaginative person to not wonder about this.
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.
> 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.
> 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]
Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere. Portugal, Spain and anyone else he asked thought he was wrong because that would've required the Earth to be around 20k miles in circumference, when the Ancient Greeks had calculated it to be 24k miles in circumference (and they were very close in their calculations). Columbus turned out to be right that there was land there, he was just wrong about what the land was.
> birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere.
Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
It doesn't matter whether the birds did or didn't. What matters is that people of the time thought birds were bringing in sticks from somewhere west. People believed there was a land out there. Whether or not the observations behind those beliefs are credible doesn't take away from the fact of their believing there was a land to find.
Another piece of land to the west before the Americas is the Azores archipelago roughly half way between Europe and Newfoundlannd. Maybe the bird came from there. This was known to Europeans well before Colombus trip.
Not a twig, but there is a recorded case of a bird making it to Europe after being shot with an African arrow. (Which it involuntarily carried with it.)
"Before migration was understood, people struggled to explain the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the white stork and barn swallow. Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time."
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.
Shape stability would be an example of being less complex than insects.
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.
"Shape stability would be an example of being less complex than insects."
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.
> Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds...
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.
Every year or two, people decide to fly from North America to Europe in a short range Cessna. They get the extra fuel tankage package, then hop from PEI to Greenland, Greenland to Iceland, then Iceland to.... Svalbard, or maybe somewhere in the Scotish Isles. From there it's pretty standard flight operations over local bodies of water. If a Cessna can do it, that's well within a bird's migratory travel distance.
A bit different, but IIRC some seeds spread by passing through birds' digestive tract—which sidesteps the bird's decisions on the luggage. However, I'd guess the distance travelled is much shorter in this case.
One of the only species of birds known to be capable of transatlantic flight, and also credibly thought to regularly making the crossing [0] is the magnificent frigate bird [1]. The bird has a super interesting capability of flying on a single half of the brain. Remarkably similar to single slower core operation of a computer... [2]
> Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere
The Portuguese settled the Azores before Columbus was born, so this sounds like a weird reason to believe India was closer.
Educated people already knew the circumference of the globe. Columbus’ miscalculation was… hopeful. There’s a sort of conspiracy theory that it was deliberate - how else was he going to get funding?
It reminds me of Amundsen. He wanted to be the first man at the north pole and raised funds to mount an expedition. However while he was planning his expedition other explorers beat him there. Without telling anyone but his crew, on the day of departure he headed south and was the first man to reach the south-pole, using funds raised for arctic exploration.
Columbus made a voyage to Bristol in the UK and certainly came across merchants who had travelled in the northern reaches, Iceland in particular. It is suggested that he did indeed travel to Iceland although the source we have for it is quite a few degrees removed from Columbus claiming it.
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?
> 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.
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.
Humans are not very good at seeing patterns when they have preconceptions.
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.
I always find it fascinating that people are so much more interested in why he sailed for America rather than how. Columbus was a navigator, not a geographer. His true discovery was not America (which plenty of people, including some Europeans, had reached before) but the replicable transatlantic voyage.
A lot of early voyages funded by the various crowns was actually put under extreme secrecy so much so that many sailors would only later be told of the real voyage...
At least that's what I recall reading awhile back. If anyone could corroborate that would be nice.
The value of secrecy in matters of commerce and state has probably been recognized from the get-go. Beyond that, nobody thought sailors had much in the way of rights; in 1571, almost a century later, there were tens of thousands of galley-slaves on both sides in the battle of Lepanto.
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:
Even if Columbus was aware of Chiesa's work (no evidence for it being widely known is given here) or had independently heard of the Norse discoveries, he could have assumed they had reached some part of Asia already speculatively sketched on the maps of the day.
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.
Given that nobody knew about this book for centuries, it seems pretty unlikely that Columbus saw it. Let alone, saw it and believed it and discounted the giants and also didn't mention it to anyone.
And in French it means, pretty much, "environment". In Swedish, I'd guess Norwegian, and in a way even in Finnish, it's "Miljö" is used as in Danish: Mainly to signify the natural environment at large; "Greta kämpar för miljön" means "Greta fights for the environment". (Though in Finnish, the native "ympäristö" is used much more than the loan "miljöö".)
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".
No, that was just the story he told to his venture investors. Fishermen probably had lots of circumstantial evidence for America at the time, but explaining that to a venture capitalist is much harder than spinning some fantabulous tall tale. (People do this sort of thing today too.)
My theory is that it means not the actual Indies, but a place like the Indies, but to the west. I suspect Europeans at the time though of India less as where the Indians live and more like a place to get cool stuff, and cool stuff was indeed found in the West Indies too.
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.
"The Indies" referred to the known archipelago in the Indian Ocean (now Indonesia and the Philippines). The Caribbean is also an archipelago, so if Columbus believed himself to be in the Indian Ocean, it's not that odd for him to assume he'd reached the western end of the same archipelago.
India is not a collection of islands, it's unlikely that Columbus mistook an archipelago for a known vast land mass.
The article should have given more context and mentioned that it wasn’t unusual for lands across the Atlantic to appear on pre-Colombian maps. Here are two examples:
The Grand Banks fisheries were known to Basque fishermen even before John Cabot's voyages, so it's not completely surprising that Markland shows up outside the sagas.
Thought i'd give a quick shout out to a book I recently read "1491 New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles Mann, and his followup book 1493.
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.
Thanks for the recommendation, I might check it out. I am curious about the notion that reading certain terms of words language or terms is could be challenging, regardless of whether or not that language would be out of usage now.
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.
Intriguely, Columbus claimed that in 1477, after visiting Bristol, England (which is confirmed), he visited Iceland, where the stories of Markland would have predominated.
If I'm not mistaken, the source for Columbus visiting Iceland was by his son Ferdinand (who said his dad left notes laying around and his son figured out he was talking about Iceland) in his biography of his father, written in Spanish, the original of which is lost; Italian copies were made, which was then translated into English as well. I don't know if "Columbus claimed" is the right way to phrase this. Ruddock [1] covers this topic well and also asks pretty pointed questions about the source today, why it exaggerates so much, etc.
"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..."
And Bristol fishermen were known to fish Icelandic waters and beyond.
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.
This find is not as surprising as the Economist article would have you believe.
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.
Herodotus dismisses a story of Phoenicians (acting for the Persian king) sailing around Africa. He says it must be a lie, because they claim that the sun was in the wrong direction--just what for a modern reader strengthens heir claim.
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.
> But the notion of trans-Atlantic voyages, the Vikings apart, seems shaky to me.
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.
The informal Chinese word for white people is "Lao Wai" which literally translates as "old foreign" (the formal word for foreigners is Wai gou Ren (foreign country person)). The explanation I was given for the informal word is that it means "the old foreigners, as in the ones we've known about since antiquity."
Lao is often use as a colloquial form of respect. So “ba” means “father”, so “lao ba” is kind of like “my old man”. “Lao ban” (ban meaning business owner / boss) is “boss”. Wives might call their husband “lao gong”. I think “jiu4” is old as in the opposite of new (xin1), as in Jiujinshan (San Francisco, literal, old gold mountain).
Yes, but "lao wai" is not actually a particularly respectful usage of "lao". It's usually said with the intent of excluding someone, which is inherently not a respectful thing to do. Respectful uses of "lao" are not used to exclude someone from the group.
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 have read that 旧金山 originated as the term for the mountain of silver the foreigners who came to trade silver for silk must have had somewhere. (They did have such a mountain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Rico ) "Gold" is, in this analysis, just a more respectful way to refer to silver.
I'm curious when and how the name might have attached itself to San Francisco, which is not near Potosí.
My experience living in Taiwan is that those terms may literally mean foreigner but their practical usage means white/western people. A native or black american would not be called that. Also, lao wai is the one they go for when they are angry or postering xenophobia amongst each other. I find it to be a needlessly othering term but I try to accept it as not said with explicitly bad intent.
The best summary of the word that I've seen is that its a lot like "gringo". Its status as pejorative or descriptive or even endearing depends on how it's said and the context in which it is said and on the person saying it. World of difference between "ey gringo, since when you drink tecate" and "what you doing in our neighborhood gringo".
Well, the traditional insult is quite different, 洋鬼子. ("Foreign devils" is the traditional translation.) People who are looking to insult foreigners have no need to use the ordinary, non-insulting word.
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?
> 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.
Consistent with this, do you also insist that they refer to the USA as "中國"?
My history may be off, but I believe that the Chinese named their country 中國 because they believed themselves the center of the world. Much like how the Romans named the Mediterranean (which means “middle sea”). The primary meaning of 中 is “middle” and it gains the meaning of “inside” by the geometric implication of the insides of something being that thing’s middle.
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.
> My history may be off, but I believe that the Chinese named their country 中國 because they believed themselves the center of the world.
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.
Rome/Constantinople and China definitely knew about each other through trade relations, and I'd guess it's quite likely that some individuals made the whole trip along the silk road long before Marco Polo:
No, GP heard some folsky etymology. Lǎowài does not mean ancient foreigner. One of 老 lǎo's meanings is an honorific like "old / venerable." 老伯 lǎobó uncle, 老闆 lǎobǎn boss, 老師 lǎoshī teacher, are all honorifics that don't mean really mean "old" (except for uncle, which you can use to address a man older than yourself, but doesn't mean he's from ancient times). 老人 lǎorén does mean "old people" but just regular old, not ancient old. 老外 lǎowài just means outsider.
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.
It might also be fair to say that a lot of “global history” of the past 30 years has been written by living people with an agenda. And the rigour of their work has not always been that high.
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.
> the "dark ages," which are basically an Italian Renaissance construct
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.
> 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.
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 the article: "...one of the students, Giulia Greco, found a passage in which Galvano, after describing Iceland and Greenland, writes: “Farther westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds.”
Where are there megalithic cultures in Northern America? Or is this evidence of a visit to Mexico?
The point is that this is evidence that scholar(s) on the other side of Europe, centuries after the Norse voyages, had heard of the lands they had discovered (Markland).
I visited Chichen Itza in a guided tour. The guide was a local Mayan man. He led us to a structure which had reliefs of people. One of the people had trimmings around his face. The guide stated that this was a man's curly beard, and that in the past this relief had been polychromed, and the color used on these trimmings was red. And as if we couldn't make the required extrapolations on our own, he said that the relief indicated that Mayans had known/may have known of Eric the Red. I don't know of other evidence that Mayans of old had direct or indirect pre-Columbian contact with curly-haired explorers from Europe. It's just that your query triggers this reminiscence.
From [1]: Modern historians and geographers have disputed the veracity of the map and the described voyages, with some accusing the younger Zeno of forgery.
There isn't much to go by here. I mean -- if they could embellish with large stone tablet buildings and "giants", we may reasonably surmise that the whole tale is a stand-in for simply uncharted/unexplored territory. The Norse equivalent of "Here be dragons".
I think the surprising news is that the norse explorations of North America was known in southern Europe. Until now I had thought it was a quite isolated event.
Markland is the Norse name for the Americas (probably should be stated more clearly in the article). So yes the description could be completely imagined, but this is evidence that word of the continent was gossiped from the Norse cultures to Italy.
Markland is frequently referenced by the fourteenth century Norse characters in Jane Smiley's novel The Greenlanders [1988].
I cannot vouch for the historical accuracy, but the whole thing appears otherwise exceedingly well researched (and is hereby highly recommended).
These people maintained contact with Europe almost to the end. Titbits of myth and knowledge will have filtered through, not least via the papacy in Rome.
It's extremely helpful that the first comment in this thread points to a non-paywalled version of the article. This seems to happen quite a lot, and it says a lot about the HN community. Still, wouldn't it be nice if HN automatically inserted a paywall-status indication in titles?
There are probably many discoveries thought to be more modern, that were actually made earlier than we realise but were never written down. Word of mouth stories are often lost during mass population upheavals like war and famine.
It may be even worse, as history was eventually established, competing narratives were probably dismissed and neglected as weird tales without foundation or merit, and eventually suppressed. For which they eventually weren't retold anymore and eventually forgotten.
This works both ways, compare the "Germania" by Tacitus, which was really about a fictional foil to contrast with the Julian dynasty, but became a historic document and origin story for a few centuries. (Sad to say, but humanists had a decent share in this.)
Related literature: Chrisopher B. Krebs, "A Most Dangerous Book. Tacitus' Germania from Roman Empire to the Third Reich", W.W. Norton & Company, NY, 2011.
Sure, but the topic was pandemics we don't know about because they weren't written down. The bubonic plague was written about pretty extensively. Even earlier disease outbreaks were written about.
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.
> And Greenland had a bishop who wrote to the church.
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.
Quite aside from the difficulty of obtaining copies -- copying texts was an arduous process -- the vast majority of the population of Europe was illiterate so nothing was widely read at the time.
> Galvano, after describing Iceland and Greenland, writes: “Farther westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds.”
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.
What if the North Americans told the Europeans stories about the stone buildings in South America?
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.
The pyramids you're talking about are in Norte Chico, the Peruvian coast of South America. South American chronology firmly establishes a pretty continuous history from those early countries down through the Wari culture, which was the chief Andean empire at the time of the Viking visits to Vinland (most people are only familiar with their successor culture, the Inca).
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.
>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:
«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.
Quite the opposite: you have copyist monks to thank for the survival of the vast majority of written material that remains from pre-christian antiquity.
How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe is a non-fiction historical book written by Thomas Cahill.
You are getting downvoted but this is the traditional history of philosophy as I understand it too (the history of Christianity will be different).
Hellenic culture and texts had permiated Africa and and Mid-east. There were various ancient libraries and academies. Byzantine scholars at the Neoplatonic Academy fled to Persia after it was closed by Justinian. Later in the 8th Century, the Greaco-Arabic Translation Movement gathered books and translated original Greek texts into Arabic at the House of Wisdom (Grand Library of Baghdad). Study of hellenic philosophy restarted in the Arabic world until the Golden Age of Islamic Philosophy with Averroes whose commentarities reintroduced Hellenic philosophy to Europe in the 12th century.
I don't think that particular flow needs any Irish Monks but <shrug> I don't know the specific sources of books used by the Translation Movement.
The monasteries of Ireland and Scotland survived the crisis and disorder of the Migration Period and re-christianized the Continent from the 8th century onwards. Yes, some texts from antiquity have come down to us only as palimpsest, but the classical writers were copied.
The works of Aristotle were translated from Greek to Arabic by Islamic scholars in the early Middle Ages, mostly pre-dating the Latin translations, and they were sometimes the source from which the Latin translations were made.
Greek Orthodox; Roman Catholics forgot Greek. Until Marsilio Ficino translated Plato to Latin around 1450, Plato had been effectively lost in the west for 1000 years.
A lot of those scholars were not "Islamic" or "Muslim", just happened to live in the area. Many of them were christians (Church of the East), Sabians, Jews, or local hellenistic inspired cults. Also some of those translations were translated to other local languages (eg. Assyrian, Hebrew...) then to Arabic.
Of course, in todays world, one could say Arabic/Islam becoming the dominant culture/religion minimized the work and exposure others get.
what pittance of codices we have today come from Christianized Maya scribes, a massively condensed post-columbian highlight reel of their obliterated textual culture compiled at the behest of the Spanish crown and under the direction of their Catholic overseers.
Also, languages like Guarani survived because of the efforts of missionaries (the Jesuits in this case).
(But I will say that the current policy of "protecting" the isolated tribes in the Amazon from human contact by categorically shutting them off is quite horrible and uncharitable. This is rooted in the preposterous myth of the noble savage. Tribal peoples are not innocent children.)
> the current policy of "protecting" the isolated tribes in the Amazon from human contact by categorically shutting them off is quite horrible and uncharitable
I dunno. If you make contact with them, most of them will die of diseases to which they have no immunity. This happens over and over. Amazon tribes. Pacific islands. On a huge scale in the Americas. For those that do survive, the event may be so traumatic that they develop a very understandable hostility to outsiders.
I'm not sure anyone would thank Bishop de Landa for burning the entire written work of a thousand year old civilization.
Disrupting a cycle of ritualized torture may find some support on humanitarian grounds, but it was no excuse to annihilate the rest of Maya literary culture as well.
Books were still hand written and centralized, they’d have been burned such that we aren’t aware of them today - doesn’t matter if it’s 15th or 17th century
Why "Christopher Columbus" and not "Cristoforo Colombo"? In Italy the press and media did not convert names into an Italian from the '60. We say New York and Joe Biden. Not Nuova Iorc and Giovanni Baiden.
