Ahead of Columbus Day, findings position more concerns of what the explorer truly anticipated to discover on his trip.
New analysis of ancient works recommends that sailors from the Italian home town of Christopher Columbus understood of America 150 years prior to its popular ‘discovery.’
Transcribing and detailing a, circa, 1345 file by a Milanese friar, Galvaneus Flamma, Medieval Latin literature specialist Professor Paolo Chiesa has actually made an “astonishing” discovery of an “exceptional” passage describing a location we understand today as North America.
According to Chiesa, the ancient essay– very first found in 2013– recommends that sailors from Genoa were currently familiar with this land, identifiable as ‘Markland’/ ‘Marckalada’– discussed by some Icelandic sources and recognized by scholars as part of the Atlantic coast of North America (generally presumed to be Labrador or Newfoundland).
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Terrae Incognitae, the discovery comes ahead of Columbus Day 2021, additionally commemorated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day throughout lots of states in the United States. The findings include more fuel to the fire for the continuing concern of ‘what, exactly, did Columbus expect to find when he set out across the ocean?’ and come following a duration in which his statues have actually been beheaded, covered with red paint, lassoed around the head and took down, set on fire and tossed into a lake.
“We are in the presence of the first reference to the American continent, albeit in an embryonic form, in the Mediterranean area,” states Professor Chiesa, from the Department of Literary Studies, Philology and Linguistics at the University of Milan.
Galvaneus was a Dominican friar who resided in Milan and was linked to a household which held at the lordship of the city.
He composed numerous literary works in Latin, primarily on historic topics. His testament is important for details on Milanese modern truths, about which he has first-hand understanding.
Cronica universalis, which is examined here by Chiesa, is believed to be among his later works– maybe the last one– and was left incomplete and unperfected. It intends to information the history of the entire world, from ‘Creation’ to when it was released.
In equating and examining the file, Professor Chiesa shows how Genoa would have been a “gateway” for news, and how Galvaneus appears to hear, informally, of seafarers’ reports about lands to the severe north-west for ultimate business advantage– in addition to details about Greenland, which he information properly (for understanding of the time).
“These rumors were too vague to find consistency in cartographic or scholarly representations,” the teacher states, as he describes why Marckalada wasn’t categorized as a colony at the time.
Regardless however, Chiesa states, Cronica universalis “brings unprecedented evidence to the speculation that news about the American continent, derived from Nordic sources, circulated in Italy one and half centuries before Columbus.”
He includes: “What makes the passage (about Marckalada) extraordinary is its geographical provenance: not the Nordic location, as when it comes to the other discusses, however northern Italy.
“The Marckalada explained by Galvaneus is ‘rich in trees’, not unlike the woody Markland of the Gr œnlendinga Saga, and animals live there.
“These details could be standard, as distinctive of any good land; but they are not trivial, because the common feature of northern regions is to be bleak and barren, as actually Greenland is in Galvaneus’s account, or as Iceland is described by Adam of Bremen.”
Overall, Professor Chiesa states, we must “trust” Cronica universalis as throughout the file Galvaneus states where he has actually become aware of oral stories, and backs his claims with aspects drawn from accounts (famous or genuine) coming from previous customs on various lands, mixed together and reassigned to a particular location.
“I do not see any reason to disbelieve him,” states Professor Chiesa, who includes, “it has actually long been discovered that the fourteenth-century portolan (nautical) charts attracted Genoa and in Catalonia provide an advanced geographical representation of the north, which might be accomplished through direct contacts with those areas.
“These concepts about the north-west are most likely to have actually pertained to Genoa through the shipping paths to the British Isles and to the continental coasts of the North Sea.
“We have no proof that Italian or Catalan seafarers ever reached Iceland or Greenland at that time, however they were definitely able to obtain from northern European merchant products of that origin to be transferred to the Mediterranean location.
“The marinarii mentioned by Galvaneus can fit into this dynamic: the Genoese might have brought back to their city scattered news about these lands, some real and some fanciful, that they heard in the northern harbors from Scottish, British, Danish, Norwegian sailors with whom they were trading.”
Cronica universalis, composed in Latin, is still unpublished; nevertheless, an edition is prepared, in the context of an academic and curriculum promoted by the University of Milan.
Reference: “Marckalada: The First Mention of America in the Mediterranean Area (c. 1340)” by Paolo Chiesa, 16 July 2021, Terrae Incognitae
DOI: 10.1080/0082288420211943792
