Medieval America

Maritime italian republics are a good candidates, both Genua and Venice had quite big holdings in eastern mediterranean, the apital and the right forma mentis for such an enterprise...

It was said thet Colunbus get the idea of getting to China by a western route by reading Marco Polo book that happened to be wrote in genoise prisons. what if this reasoning was done by a contemporary, may be the same pisan who actually put the Million on paper under the dictation of Polo?

Except that due to Pax Mongolia it was very easy for trade to be conducted overland from Europe to China, so there is little impedus for trade.

I like that a lot :).

To respond to several people, yes, the later Powers of Europe were insanely weak at this point. But there were some successful maritime states that, I think, could conceivably have wound up trading with the Americas. Nobody's in any position to make colonies as we are used to seeing them... I think this is the whole appeal of this idea. A totally different dynamic between Europe and the New World, something more akin to that between Europe and Africa or Asia.

I wonder what this would do to the theologians. Their concept of the cosmos was so neat and tidy - a whole new continent would have blown their medieval minds.

I doubt it, especialy since the information would spred rather slowly, and Medieval Europe expected to find strange and fantastic things beyond thier borders. After all there is a long history, especialy in the British Isles, of myths of islands in the North Atlantic.
 
Except that due to Pax Mongolia it was very easy for trade to be conducted overland from Europe to China, so there is little impedus for trade.



I doubt it, especialy since the information would spred rather slowly, and Medieval Europe expected to find strange and fantastic things beyond thier borders. After all there is a long history, especialy in the British Isles, of myths of islands in the North Atlantic.

Yes, we all know that was the fall of Costantinopolis that forced the search of an alternative route, still with the right PoD...

And the speed of information, by sea, is exacly the same in middle ages than untill the age of great galleons...

So, let's say that Rustichello da Pisa included in his writing a fake account of the chinese expedition to "Cipangu and the Land that lies East" exagerating the richness and the extentions of Japanise land (a translation in wich japanise Islands become japanise continent?).

By the same time Genoa was at the apex of his political power, having won both against Pisa (1284) and Venice (1298), Sardinia was still genoise and a huge quantity of money was siphoned in to his economy by the orient.

Instead of fading from history Rustichello gets the hear of gnoise rulers (at the beginning claiming an extensive knowlege of Corsica, recently aquired from Pisa) and to keep his position encurage the idea of a commercial expedition o Cipangu claiming it wold be not too far wast from Morocco's coasts (just to keep vague but belivable)...
 
I think that Islam would have settlement opportunities.I think that at that time they were as capable of that as Northern Europe.
 
While I like a good Sinowank as much as the next fella, I can tell you that this is pretty unlikely at this point in time. Even during the periods in which China possessed the money and arms (variable over time), it had little impetus for colonization. China's population, while always somewhat large, really didn't start to balloon to the levels we think of today until the mid-to-late eighteenth century or so. Beyond this, the Pacific is a difficult ocean to cross, even moreso than the Atlantic, in particular with fourteenth century technology.

I thought the whole thing was pretty darn difficult to pull off, only guessing Chinese because, well, they're there. Rich, powerful beyond the imagination of western Europe, possibly well travelled. In the 1300's, were they MOngol?
 
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