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A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
- frozenlettuce 5y agolink without paywall https://web.archive.org/web/20210924231520/https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/09/25/a-monk-in-14th-century-italy-wrote-about-the-americas https://web.archive.org/web/20210924231520/https://www.econo...
- tucosan 5y agoThat link is paywalled all the same.
- drivers99 5y agoWorked for me.
- j1elo 5y agoI just read the whole article from the archived link. So I can confirm it Works for me™.
- muststopmyths 5y agoif you are running a script blocker, you might need to block economist.com. That's what made it work for me with this link.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- magneticnorth 5y agoThe first time I clicked it I also still saw the paywall; when I tried again it was gone - very odd.
- onetimename 5y agoFor those downvoting the user, it was also paywalled for me. On mobile if that matters. Edit: but revisiting worked.
- zokier 5y agoThe actual journal article https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1943792 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...
- j56no 5y agopaywall shows up there too for me
- namenotrequired 5y agoHow likely is this to be real? If real, was this work originally widely read in its time?
- cperciva 5y agoQuite 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.
- btilly 5y agoThis is certainly real. An unfinished and unpublished work in an era before the printing press is guaranteed to not have been widely read.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.
- jcranmer 5y ago> 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.
- btilly 5y agoJudging from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gar%C3%B0ar,_Greenland#Diocese_of_Gar%C3%B0ar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gar%C3%B0ar,_Greenland#Diocese..., most of the bishops up through the 1300s did spend time in Greenland.
- ummonk 5y agoAccording to the paper (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1943792 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00822884.2021.1...), it wasn't widely known (or at least believed) in Italy at the time (since Genoese maps didn't reflect North American lands). 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.
- Thorentis 5y agoThere 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- frupert52 5y agoAnd pandemics?
- tootie 5y agoPandemics would be pretty unlikely in the days of such low population density. Epidemics definitely happened pretty routinely though.
- blfr 5y agoThere was a bubonic plague pandemic (1346-1353) right after the time this book was wrtten (1339-1345 according to OP).
- tootie 5y agoSure, 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.
- sebws 5y agoI think the topic was how pandemics would cause word of mouth stories to be lost, not the story of pandemics.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
- HarryHirsch 5y agoThe 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.
- koheripbal 5y agoThat seems unlikely. source?
- etrevino 5y agoI'll try to find a source, but it's true. The import of this wasn't apparent to them, though.
- dc-programmer 5y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Basque-History-World-Story-Nation/dp/0140298517/ref=asc_df_0140298517/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=343934451310&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8849254416849914413&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061285&hvtargid=pla-455778950295&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=69317523535&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=343934451310&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8849254416849914413&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061285&hvtargid=pla-455778950295 https://www.amazon.com/Basque-History-World-Story-Nation/dp/...
- rupi 5y agoThe book ‘Cod’ goes into detail on this.
- dc-programmer 5y agoSame author as history of the basque people (and also salt). Definitely recommend all three
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- exdsq 5y agoAnd even if they were written down, the Catholic church sure did love to burn books back then!
- hprotagonist 5y agoQuite the opposite: you have copyist monks to thank for the survival of the vast majority of written material that remains from pre-christian antiquity.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jbay808 5y agoI thought that was mostly due to Islamic scholars. Weren't the monks mostly erasing and repurposing old scrolls to make copies of the Bible?
- kome 5y agowhat? no. if we can read plato and aristotle - and a bunch of others - it's thanks to Catholics monk.
- joshuaissac 5y agoThe 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. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotle 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-influence/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-influence/
- jhgb 5y agoBut people never forgot Greek. It was, and still is, a living language. (Not to mention the undesirability of second-hand translations...)
- jmchuster 5y ago> 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.
- tootie 5y agoGiven 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.
- blfr 5y agoI think the idea is that he heard the same tales because he was in the same milieu, not that he read that book.
- tailspin2019 5y agoTIL a cool new word; "milieu" > the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milieu https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milieu
- CryptoPunk 5y agoIntriguely, Columbus claimed that in 1477, after visiting Bristol, England (which is confirmed), he visited Iceland, where the stories of Markland would have predominated.
- fsckboy 5y agointeresting! here's what wikipedia says: "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..."
- kitd 5y agoAnd 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.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoThat's a fun etymology. I thought it was well established that the name America came either directly or indirectly from explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
- kitd 5y agoI agree, it's the more likely source. But as a Welshman, I quite like this one!
- lodovic 5y agoI'm pretty sure America was named after Amerigo Vespucci.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- earksiinni 5y agoThis 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Zeno_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_of_the_Zeno_brothers [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Origins-European-Economy-Communications-Commerce/dp/0521661021 https://www.amazon.com/Origins-European-Economy-Communicatio...
- oh_sigh 5y agoFrom [1]: Modern historians and geographers have disputed the veracity of the map and the described voyages, with some accusing the younger Zeno of forgery.
- exhibitapp 5y agohttps://archive.fo/yFias https://archive.fo/yFias
- tambourine_man 5y agohttps://archive.is/QWGtl https://archive.is/QWGtl
- akamaka 5y agoThe 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: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)
- koheripbal 5y agoThese seem more likely to represent the Canary Islands.
- twirlock 5y agoI don't understand why dan g heavily moderates our comments while allowing links to paywall websites that don't want to be included in news aggregation.
- ezekiel68 5y agoThere 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".
- mongol 5y agoI 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.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoI’m not sure of the timeline, but Vikings ships were known to sail all the way to Venice.
- sigmar 5y agoMarkland 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.
- interfixus 5y agoMarkland 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.
- swalsh 5y agoThought 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.
- rocketbop 5y agoThanks 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.
- fbn79 5y agoWhy "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.
- alserio 5y agoJust complain to Regina Elisabetta
- newfriend 5y agoGiuseppe Baiden Giovanni = John, Giuseppe = Joseph
- avereveard 5y agoFunny you claim that, since we do study in school about Cartesio and Copernico.
- Zardoz84 5y agoCristóbal Colón, you mean
- CRConrad 5y agoHe was Genoese, not Spanish.
- bluenose69 5y agoIt'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?
- theCodeStig 5y agoThe author could have at the least, used Cristoforo Colombo, instead of the anglicized version.
- known 5y agoHalf a millennium before Columbus “discovered” America, those Viking feet may have been the first European ones to ever have touched North American soil. https://www.history.com/news/the-viking-explorer-who-beat-columbus-to-america https://www.history.com/news/the-viking-explorer-who-beat-co...