141–150 of 244 posts
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I think the idea is that he heard the same tales because he was in the same milieu, not that he read that book.
TIL a cool new word; "milieu" > the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milieu
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.
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This 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 An unfinished and unpublished work in an era before the printing press is guaranteed to not have been widely read.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.
> 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.
How likely is this to be real? If real, was this work originally widely read in its time?
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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch But that's different, I doubt birds intentionally carry anything from Africa either.
"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 transfo…
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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. 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, wh…
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. [0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 transfo…
Transforming isn't exactly unknown; all insects do it.
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 i…
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.
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.
> 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…
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).…
[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...