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A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

economist.com

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Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#161

Post by tremon »

weswpg wrote: post #114
dboreham wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably fake history. Modern thinking is that Columbus had a pretty good idea where he was going because others had already been there.

Why is the area referred to as "the west Indies" unless he thought it was India

"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.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#162

Post by [deleted] »

Andrex wrote: post #81
buescher wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I believe in current parlance that is called "hustle." (Or in less generous terms, "fraud.")

[deleted]

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#163

Post by flohofwoe »

ummwhat wrote: post #52
earksiinni wrote: post #46

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 pol…

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."

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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#164

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

buescher wrote: post #35
jmchuster wrote: post #19

> 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…

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.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#165

Post by ant6n »

sandworm101 wrote: post #106
crakenzak wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If birds do do that, it's a strong indication that people may have actually believed it happened, rather than the believe being just a myth.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#166

Post by thaumasiotes »

garmaine wrote: post #153
thaumasiotes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct that it is very different in Taiwan. 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 corre…

> 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"?

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#167

Post by hutzlibu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #151
hutzlibu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but by the 18.th century, we knew that birds and mammals are a bit more complex than insects and quite shape stable.

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.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#168

Post by qw »

jaclaz wrote: post #144
namenotrequired wrote: post #9

How likely is this to be real? If real, was this work originally widely read in its 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 th…

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.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#169

Post by ethbr0 »

hirako2000 wrote: post #122
throw0101a wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

We "did." [0]

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...

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#170

Post by tgflynn »

ochrist wrote: post #141
tailspin2019 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL a cool new word; "milieu" > the physical or social setting in which something occurs or develops https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/milieu

The Danish (Scandinavian) word 'miljø' usually translates to 'environment'.

Milieu is a French word. My guess is that your Danish word is also derived from the French.
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