Pre-Columbian knowledge confirmed: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

“In this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build with them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds,” the friar, Galvaneus Flamma, wrote in a singular tome called the Cronica Universalis.

“This astonishing find is the first known report to circulate in the Mediterranean of the American continent, and if Columbus was aware of what these sailors knew it might have helped convince him make his voyage,” said Paolo Chiesa, who led the research at the University of Milan. His team’s findings appear in Terrae Incognitae, the Journal of the Society for the History of Discoveries.
I find the description of Markland as being a land of cyclopean megaliths interesting, though. Seems very clearly to be a misunderstanding of the adjacent "Helluland," a land of giant stone slabs, which somehow got conflated into being buildings of stone slabs rather than cliffs and rock faces.
There are ancient buildings in this continent made by "huge slabs of stone", so this makes me wonder how far the Scandinavians went on their travels.
 
Could you have Marckalada be the western name for the americas ittl if say Columbus had sailed for England rather than Spain and put two and two together?
 
There are ancient buildings in this continent made by "huge slabs of stone", so this makes me wonder how far the Scandinavians went on their travels.
As I said, I think it's just a game of telephone - Helluland means "Stone Slab Land" or "Anvil Land," a description of the immense, sheer, rocky coastlines of northern Labrador . I think that saying that this was a land of giant stone slabs carried to people who hadn't been first hand to America of something constructed, and from there the obvious interpolation was that they had been built by giants.

@Arkenfolm's suggestion is an interesting one, but I'm not even sure if the Inuit would have been present ~1000 AD. Did the Dorset engage in such stone works?

If so, it is interesting to keep in mind that the Inuit accounted the people who they dispossessed the land from (often identified with the Dorset) as giants... though I think this is probably a coincidence, calling ancestors and vanquished races giants seems to be very near a human universal.

Could you have Marckalada be the western name for the americas ittl if say Columbus had sailed for England rather than Spain and put two and two together?
Why? This discovery is about an Italian chronicle, there's no evidence to suggest any persistence of knowledge of Vinland in the British Isles - or any knowledge at all, for that matter (though of course it is pretty likely that someone somewhere in Britain wrote about it in the Middle Ages)
 
Why? This discovery is about an Italian chronicle, there's no evidence to suggest any persistence of knowledge of Vinland in the British Isles - or any knowledge at all, for that matter (though of course it is pretty likely that someone somewhere in Britain wrote about it in the Middle Ages)
I find the idea of the Americas being called something else, like potentially Marckalada, interesting. Someone prior had mentioned Columbus may have read these documents or at the least had knowledge of Marckalada. I was positing that if he had been in the service of the king of england as he had tried to work for iotl, he may have actually stumbled on markland/marcklada and put two and two together instead of referring to the new land as the indies and later America.
 
One element of this episode that I find fascinating is the extent to which the Genoese chronicle may represent an isolated survival of a once much more widely propagated oral tradition. The suggestion that the author could learn of the existence of northeasternmost North America through sailors who partook in a body of knowledge common to European sailors that included knowledge of a land just beyond distant Greenland is fascinating. There may well be all sorts of things that people knew but just did not bother recording, whether because they thought it was not worth noting or because they thought that there was no need to do this since everyone knew it.

If there was more widespread knowledge of northeasternmost North America than we might have thought, though, this underlines the extent to which people did not care about the discovery. Helluland/Maryland/Vinland going almost entirely unnoticed by Europe makes sense, if you assume that it was a desirable resource-rich territory particularly accessible, only if you assume that hardly anyone knew about it. By the time that reliable chroniclers in northern Italy are commenting on the existence of the territory as a matter-of-fact aside, lots of people know that Helluland/Markland/Vinland exist.

Northeasternmost North America was overlooked not because no one knew about it; it was overlooked because it was not worth paying attention to. The Greenland Norse seem to have paid attention to the shores of the adjacent continent mainly because it was a useful place to scavenge resources, like wood and the walrus tusks that were key exports. For more distant population, this land located far from not just Christendom but the whole of the inhabited world with sparse resources and a hostile native population would have been a curiosity. Why bother colonizing this land?

That there was no sense, not apparently as reported by the Norse and not as recorded by Europeans, that these three lands were part of a larger continent is also key. If Helluland and Markland and Vinland were just marginally habitable lands scattered in the Arctic region of the world ocean, lacking in any geopolitical importance, what would be the point?

If you wanted to get European navigators to build upon Norse knowledge to do a Columbus and establish regular contact with the Americas, I think that the best way to do so would be to find local resources. The fisheries of the Grand Banks strike me as the most obvious possibility in the region of the Norse discoveries. As others have mentioned, English and Basque fishers may well have been fishing there—and using adjacent Newfoundland as a convenient base—even before Columbus. Could they have been found and exploited earlier still?
 
I find the idea of the Americas being called something else, like potentially Marckalada, interesting. Someone prior had mentioned Columbus may have read these documents or at the least had knowledge of Marckalada. I was positing that if he had been in the service of the king of england as he had tried to work for iotl, he may have actually stumbled on markland/marcklada and put two and two together instead of referring to the new land as the indies and later America.
This new discovery has nothing to do with the British Isles. If Columbus sailed for Britain, it does not follow that he would then name America Marckalada. Marckalada was not a name that was extant in Britain, it was extant in his own home of Genoa a hundred years prior.
One element of this episode that I find fascinating is the extent to which the Genoese chronicle may represent an isolated survival of a once much more widely propagated oral tradition. The suggestion that the author could learn of the existence of northeasternmost North America through sailors who partook in a body of knowledge common to European sailors that included knowledge of a land just beyond distant Greenland is fascinating. There may well be all sorts of things that people knew but just did not bother recording, whether because they thought it was not worth noting or because they thought that there was no need to do this since everyone knew it.

If there was more widespread knowledge of northeasternmost North America than we might have thought, though, this underlines the extent to which people did not care about the discovery. Helluland/Maryland/Vinland going almost entirely unnoticed by Europe makes sense, if you assume that it was a desirable resource-rich territory particularly accessible, only if you assume that hardly anyone knew about it. By the time that reliable chroniclers in northern Italy are commenting on the existence of the territory as a matter-of-fact aside, lots of people know that Helluland/Markland/Vinland exist.

Northeasternmost North America was overlooked not because no one knew about it; it was overlooked because it was not worth paying attention to. The Greenland Norse seem to have paid attention to the shores of the adjacent continent mainly because it was a useful place to scavenge resources, like wood and the walrus tusks that were key exports. For more distant population, this land located far from not just Christendom but the whole of the inhabited world with sparse resources and a hostile native population would have been a curiosity. Why bother colonizing this land?

That there was no sense, not apparently as reported by the Norse and not as recorded by Europeans, that these three lands were part of a larger continent is also key. If Helluland and Markland and Vinland were just marginally habitable lands scattered in the Arctic region of the world ocean, lacking in any geopolitical importance, what would be the point?

If you wanted to get European navigators to build upon Norse knowledge to do a Columbus and establish regular contact with the Americas, I think that the best way to do so would be to find local resources. The fisheries of the Grand Banks strike me as the most obvious possibility in the region of the Norse discoveries. As others have mentioned, English and Basque fishers may well have been fishing there—and using adjacent Newfoundland as a convenient base—even before Columbus. Could they have been found and exploited earlier still?
I agree with most of your points here, but I would note two things.

First, of course, I don't like the citation of English and Basque fishermen not only in the Grand Banks but using Newfoundland as a base because there is absolutely no information to support this.

Second, I wouldn't put much stock into the fact that a chronicler mentions it "matter of factly." Putting aside what it means to be a "reliable" chronicler in the Middle Ages, all chroniclers would cite at least some rather fabulous things in a manner of fact way, including all manner of geographic confabulations - Antilia, St. Brendant, Brasil. Obviously in the case of Marckalada there was a germ of truth behind it, but I don't think that really counts for much.
 
How definitive is the source? Its sounds quite vague and like others have said perhaps mythologizing the unknown areas to the west was common.

It also seems even if true it couldn't have had much bearing on Columbus. He sailed from Spain and ran into the West Indies, which is a long way from “sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway”.
Columbus probably visited Ireland and Iceland in the 1470s. He coming from Spain doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have been influenced by more northern knowledge.
 
We know the Norse were in North America centuries before this. Not sure how an even later voyage with less impact would be big news? The biggest impact of Columbus voyages was not just the "discovery" aspect but the Colombian exchanged which literally changed the world as we know it.

If people aside from the Norse had visited the Americas prior to that but left no lasting trace or impact, it's like the saying if a tree falls in the woods but nobody hears it, did it really fall?
 
This new discovery has nothing to do with the British Isles. If Columbus sailed for Britain, it does not follow that he would then name America Marckalada. Marckalada was not a name that was extant in Britain, it was extant in his own home of Genoa a hundred years prior.
Did you even read what I wrote? Assuming Columbus was familiar with the text describing Marckalada, it would be cool for him to land around the OTL Markland, which would be plausible if he sailed for Britain, make the connection that he had rediscovered Marckalada, and relay that back to Britain. I know the article has nothing to do with the British Isles. I was just thinking of a potential TL.
 
First, of course, I don't like the citation of English and Basque fishermen not only in the Grand Banks but using Newfoundland as a base because there is absolutely no information to support this.

There are tantalizing suggestions, from the work of historian Alwyn Ruddock and then from the work of the historians trying to reconstruct her work, of Bristol being a port that has very early if irregular contact with the Americas. Ruddock cited a pre-1470 date for an early discovery.



It might be worth noting that Ruddock did much of her research in Italy, looking into the archives of merchant houses and noble families interested in long-distance trade.

As for the possibility of fishers, well, where did the late medieval Basques get their cod from? The Grand Banks seems not implausible. Were there other possibilities?
 
Columbus landing north could potentially butterfly away the progression of Spanish expansion into the Caribbean and then Mesoamerica, changing the fate of the Aztecs and other peoples there.
 

Crazy Boris

Banned
Columbus landing north could potentially butterfly away the progression of Spanish expansion into the Caribbean and then Mesoamerica, changing the fate of the Aztecs and other peoples there.

...maybe not by that much. Diseases spread across the Americas pretty fast via preexisting trade routes. Even if patient zero for Smallpox in the Americas is in Labrador, it’s only a matter of time until it hits Tenochtitlan. Depending on how hard it hits and how fast they can recover, it could change things, but the general death rate of disease in the Americas doesn’t paint an optimistic picture.
 
I mean it'd go differently. Say they focus their efforts on the north and the Portuguese, English, French, or even some other power beats them to their historical holdings.
 
I mean it'd go differently. Say they focus their efforts on the north and the Portuguese, English, French, or even some other power beats them to their historical holdings.

Why would they focus on the north? The Spanish weren’t settlers. Their MO was conquer a place that had lots of people and exploit their labor. The Caribbean, Mexico and Peru were the most densely populated places in the Americas. They only searched further afield after those places were conquered.
 
I just mean if they were distracted by exploring the north, someone else could beat them to the other regions. As opposed to Columbus reaching Hispanola in the first place.
 
...maybe not by that much. Diseases spread across the Americas pretty fast via preexisting trade routes. Even if patient zero for Smallpox in the Americas is in Labrador, it’s only a matter of time until it hits Tenochtitlan. Depending on how hard it hits and how fast they can recover, it could change things, but the general death rate of disease in the Americas doesn’t paint an optimistic picture.
There’s no trade routes connecting Tenochtitlan and Labrador at that time. IOTL many indigenous communities in NA remained intact for centuries after Colombian discovery, until the Europeans arrived in person and only then diseases started to kill them. IIRC the population of what is today the northeastern US only began declining after Hudson’s voyages in the early 17th century.
 
...maybe not by that much. Diseases spread across the Americas pretty fast via preexisting trade routes. Even if patient zero for Smallpox in the Americas is in Labrador, it’s only a matter of time until it hits Tenochtitlan. Depending on how hard it hits and how fast they can recover, it could change things, but the general death rate of disease in the Americas doesn’t paint an optimistic picture.
Smallpox kills so fast there's essentially no chance for it to do much more than kill a few villages along the Labrador Coast, and the same goes with most diseases. Even a disease optimized for spreading across long distances like chickenpox/shingles or mumps doesn't appear to have done much IOTL in North American given the low population densities over most of the continent. There probably just wasn't a high enough volume of trade.
 
Smallpox kills so fast there's essentially no chance for it to do much more than kill a few villages along the Labrador Coast, and the same goes with most diseases. Even a disease optimized for spreading across long distances like chickenpox/shingles or mumps doesn't appear to have done much IOTL in North American given the low population densities over most of the continent. There probably just wasn't a high enough volume of trade.

That, along with the apparent isolation of the Greenland Norse from Eurasian pandemIcs, is why I am sceptical of the Greenland Norse bring a suitable vehicle for inoculation.
 
Exactly, or even Marcalandia. No reason to prefix an A.

Just because there's no reason for it to happen doesn't preclude it from happening.

There's a possibility that phrases such as "vamos a Marclandia" could have become "vamos Amarclandia" as words or phrases were mistranslated into English.

Consider, "vamos a cazar el lagarto." ("We are going to hunt the lizard.") Later, "el lagarto" became "alligator" in English. "Vamos a cazar alligator." ("We are going to hunt alligator.") This also happened with words moving from French to English ("a croix" becoming "across"). It also happened the 'other way round' with, for example, "natter" (German for adder) becoming "adder" in English as "a natter" became "an adder."

None of these prefixes were added deliberately, but language just sometimes does things like that.

Regards,

Northstar
 
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