Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

191–200 of 244 posts

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

#191
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

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] [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274193260_Has_the_m... [1] https://en.wi…

From Wikipedia: “Frigatebirds (…) sometimes indulge in kleptoparasitism, harassing other birds to force them to regurgitate their food”

I knew birds could regurgitate food (to feed their young) but this is something else…

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A relevant case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pytheas#Literary_influence (I linked to where he's getting dismissed as a liar centuries later, but the main story about the voyage is way more interesting.)

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.

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

#193
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a new theology ...

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

#194

> 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…

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley_slave#Europe

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:

http://www.christopher-columbus.eu/ships-crew.htm

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, there was also the Albigensian Crusade and not a single piece of catharian writing survived this.

This is false. The "Liber de duobus principiis" survived.

Mind that this originated from a diverging faction, written about 1240, essentially after the crusade (1209–1229).

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

#196

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 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

Phantom island have been around for a while:

> 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]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Island,_New_Caledonia

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

#197
post #168
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 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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuksuk

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

#198

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".

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.

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

#199
post #175

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 (…

> On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly handle uncertainty.

No, we're actually (thankfully) a lot better at that than 15th Century Europe.

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

#200
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure if you're arguing from an epistemological or objective basis, but I'll assume the latter.

We know that our knowledge better describes the results we reliably reproduce in the world around us.

We have knowledge about things that our ancestors did not.

If that doesn't constitute "knowing more than they did," I'm not sure what does.

Post reply on HN