Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the land west of England just...Ireland?
Again, Columbus was not a very clever man.
Let's first see you wangle tens or hundreds of millions in today's money from the Spanish Crown, then you can say that.
A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
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Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#242Earlier 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?
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…
> There is a deeper question of why a man would go on a theoretically suicidal voyage, and on top of that, be funded by royalty to do so.
For the Spanish crown, it could have been just a matter of hedging its bets. It was a huge amount of money to one man or enterprise, but not so much to one of the great powers of Europe.
Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And in French it means, pretty much, "environment". In Swedish, I'd guess Norwegian, and in a way even in Finnish, it's "Miljö" is used as in Danish: Mainly to signify the natural environment at large; "Greta kämpar för miljön" means "Greta fights for the environment". (Though in Finnish, the native "ympäristö" is used much more than the loan "miljöö".)
In German, though, AIUI "das Milieu" usually means a different kind of environment: That of crime and shady business. "Es bewegt sich was im Milieu" is something a worried cop could say, meaning approximately "something's happening on the streets".