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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

#181

Post by mannykannot »

phil_folrida wrote: post #180
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 is highly speculative to say Japan, even today we reference Native American as Indians. 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.

At the time, the term "indies" was widely used for eastern Asia and eastern lands generally.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/Indies

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

#182

Post by simonh »

hasmanean wrote: post #171
JudgePenitent wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

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 cros…

Or someone ate some trippy mushrooms.

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

#184

Post by bluenose69 »

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?

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

#185

Post by hirako2000 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #175
hirako2000 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we knew the right answer but we didn't accept it as correct so most people followed suit. 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.

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 (…

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.

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

#186

Post by jaclaz »

qw wrote: post #168
jaclaz wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

>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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiary

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

#187

Post by washadjeffmad »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #177
scythe wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly not if the goal is to impress a potential mate.

Have you just invented this or is that actually some well-known fact that birds impress potential mates this way?

The joke is that the Cessna fliers are doing it to collect the twigs.

If you edit out 'birds', it'd be pure comedy.

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

#188

Post by pedrosorio »

joecot wrote: post #32
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…

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 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.

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

#189

Post by arp242 »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #156
arp242 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ima…

> 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. Which people do you mean?

The natives Poe imagined to be living in the Antarctic in his novel.

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

#190

Post by mannykannot »

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…

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.

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