The Legacy of Saint Brendan: A History of the Western Hemisphere, 512 to 1400
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markus meecham
Banned
maybe someone finds out about fermenting maple syrup...
what? people have outside lives? preposterous.
And I don't believe we've been supplied figures. Bear in mind mead and "wine" are the drinks in use at this time, beer tech having not arrived or achieved popularity.
This sounds reasonable. I suspect there'd be a touch of native berries added too, where they exist.
Though it's worth bearing in mind that the introduction of honey bees OTL caused a serious pollination problem as the bees kill off native pollinators.
You'll have to look into whether hybridisation with local bees is possible.
Brunaburh
Banned
I don't want to pour cold water on what is a very ably written and interesting timeline, but I have a couple of observations of 3 aspects I find worrying.
1. (the easier one) There were no child kings in Dark Age Britain. You could be a child, you could be a king, you couldn't be both. The first child king I know of in Britain would be Henry III.
2. (The medium difficulty one) You are portraying 6th century Ireland as too economically diverse. You had warriors, peasant-warriors, peasants, bard/druids and priests. The state and more complex institutions didn't exist. Mercenaries didn't exist either, men came into service of a lord through his power to gift, so either all warriors are mercenaries, or none are.
3. (The one that really worries me) How the hell are they doing all this in currachs? We suspect they were in Iceland at a similar time, but Newfoundland is a long, long way away from Iceland, across deadly seas. You haven't got a stop off in Greenland, and they don't seem to have any special navigational knowledge, so how are they doing this? For me, given a stopover in Greenland, it might just be possible, but the attrition rate would be horrifying, I doubt if half the attempts to reach Newfoundland would be successful.
I really want to be wrong about point 3, because I'm enjoying this, but it is a nagging doubt as I'm reading. Put my mind at rest?
1. (the easier one) There were no child kings in Dark Age Britain. You could be a child, you could be a king, you couldn't be both. The first child king I know of in Britain would be Henry III.
2. (The medium difficulty one) You are portraying 6th century Ireland as too economically diverse. You had warriors, peasant-warriors, peasants, bard/druids and priests. The state and more complex institutions didn't exist. Mercenaries didn't exist either, men came into service of a lord through his power to gift, so either all warriors are mercenaries, or none are.
3. (The one that really worries me) How the hell are they doing all this in currachs? We suspect they were in Iceland at a similar time, but Newfoundland is a long, long way away from Iceland, across deadly seas. You haven't got a stop off in Greenland, and they don't seem to have any special navigational knowledge, so how are they doing this? For me, given a stopover in Greenland, it might just be possible, but the attrition rate would be horrifying, I doubt if half the attempts to reach Newfoundland would be successful.
I really want to be wrong about point 3, because I'm enjoying this, but it is a nagging doubt as I'm reading. Put my mind at rest?
This is a long post so, as it's only incidental to the story, I've spoilered it.
However, it is entirely possible that currachs could have made the crossing. The Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis mentions the currach which was used by St Brendan, which could be understood to be a boat made for sea-going.
So having a good number of successful crossings is plausible even just with currachs, imo, though there would be lots of unsuccessful ones as well. I don't have a good source for the percentages of ships which were lost during the OTL early transatlantic crossings, so I can't make an assessment of what proportion of these, less capable, boats would be lost (though Vasco de Gama lost two of his four ships on his 1498 voyage, which might be a good(!) starting point). Travelling the North Atlantic, the boats would have to content with storms and icebergs, never mind the problems of navigating before the compass was available (nor the mediæval sunstone as the mineral doesn't occur in Ireland). The crews would also have to contend with diseases (scurvy from lack of vitamin C, typhoid from contaminated water, etc) and other illnesses/dangers (dehydration, sunstroke, frostbite).
Notwithstanding that, it's plausible, I think, for enough of the boats/crews to cross back and forth that the trade route would be maintained. There's potential for the TL to take account of the dangers by having something valuable/someone important lost at sea, perhaps - but, as ever, it's up to the author!
I agree, but think this is forgivable within the context of the story if we assume it is being told from a modern(-ish) perspective. There are lots of popular history books which make similar generalisations implying more centralised control than there was at the time - the justification being that it's too difficult to explain the real complexities of the society/ies involved without making the story too dry. That's a matter of opinion, of course.
I agree that there would have been many more unsuccessful crossings - in fact I said something like this at the end of my first comment on this TL (post 12).
However, it is entirely possible that currachs could have made the crossing. The Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis mentions the currach which was used by St Brendan, which could be understood to be a boat made for sea-going.
There are some other historical sources which refer to ocean-going currachs as well, I believe (one site even has a picture of 'a model of St Brendan's currach').http://www.markjberry.blogs.com/StBrendan.pdf said:
So having a good number of successful crossings is plausible even just with currachs, imo, though there would be lots of unsuccessful ones as well. I don't have a good source for the percentages of ships which were lost during the OTL early transatlantic crossings, so I can't make an assessment of what proportion of these, less capable, boats would be lost (though Vasco de Gama lost two of his four ships on his 1498 voyage, which might be a good(!) starting point). Travelling the North Atlantic, the boats would have to content with storms and icebergs, never mind the problems of navigating before the compass was available (nor the mediæval sunstone as the mineral doesn't occur in Ireland). The crews would also have to contend with diseases (scurvy from lack of vitamin C, typhoid from contaminated water, etc) and other illnesses/dangers (dehydration, sunstroke, frostbite).
Notwithstanding that, it's plausible, I think, for enough of the boats/crews to cross back and forth that the trade route would be maintained. There's potential for the TL to take account of the dangers by having something valuable/someone important lost at sea, perhaps - but, as ever, it's up to the author!
This is where that competition and need for groups to try to get better comes in. The author has done a good job, I think, and it is easy for me to imagine what I commented about in my first comment on the thread, that there may have been some advances out of necessity. Perhaps those advances needed to come closer to 520 than 620 AD than I even thought, but like in the comment about it being from the point of view of a modern day historian, I can certainly see such things being glossed over a bit for the sake of story.
I had forgotten about scurvy, but I wonder how many berries and other things in Newfoundland would give vitamin C. Edit: found some. It could be a simple case of those who eat more berries not getting as sick and them deciding to have them eat them without knowing why. Even the stopover in Greenland, I can imagine that happening just just by sailor error, going too far north and realizing hey, this make a good stopping point.
So I don't see a problem with this, per se, it's all solvable with what in TV or movies would be throwaway lines, like "we used to tease Ed about all the berries he ate till we realized he never got sick."
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You bring up some very good points there! Points Two and Three have been ably addressed by @FriendlyGhost, but I’ll add a little bit of my own info as well.
Point One- I can address by saying that it was more meant to illustrate a general crisis in leadership than anything else. A conflict between two competing adult sons could easily stand in for a more period-appropriate crisis.
Point Two- Basically what Friendly Ghost said. This is a modern popular history-style simplification of a much more complex and less-centralized worldview. The “mercenaries” could be treated as roving warriors seeking for kings to pledge their loyalty too in exchange for gifts. The “companies” could be treated as modern reflections on loosely allied coalitions of Fánaithe whose voyages are backed by petty kings, nobility, local clergy (which translates to, in a modern popular history-style simplification, “kings backed them” instead of “kings were among the backers”).
This style, though it does have its disadvantages, helps readers get the general idea of what happened and keeping up the pace of the story without bogging the timeline down in pages long explanations of the intricacies of Dark Age Irish kingship. More of a styilistic choice on my part, than anything else.
Point Three- Modern experimentation has proven that currachs of the type used by Brendan could have made the long haul to Newfoundland. I’ve mentioned the dangers involved in the crossing at several points in the updates (for example with the first Fánathe voyage, where a currach sank on the return trip, as well as mentions in almost every discussion of sea crossings of men dying along the way of various ailments). As more trips are made to the island, advances in ship-building technology are coming along as well, allowing for currachs better-suited to ocean travel.
Brunaburh
Banned
Yeah that's a bit that worries me as well, how do they keep hitting Newfoundland? The coastal route via Greenland would do that most of the time, but a lot of people are going to miss. They'll never be seen again likely enough.
markus meecham
Banned
and this is how european disease spread all over the eastern coast of americaI was trying to keep that a secret for later...
That's assuming the Irish voyagers there actually survive, since Eastern Greenland is considered the less habitable part of the island (and the Dorset and Independence cultures were in Western and Northern Greenland respectively). The Fanaithe could make a go of it, but that part of the country is near virtual suicide, kinda like a mirror image of the Insula Benedictorum.
I doubt any diseases the stranded folks could have would really travel that far as the nearest human beings are hundreds of miles away on the other side of a huge island.
We still have the Byzantines coming West. Were they at all interested in exploration, at least as far as trade? Any famous map makers of that era? Then Charlemagne, but he seemed to have his hands full with land expansion, enemies on all frontiers. I doubt he'd be terribly interested in taking on the ocean.
There are some surviving early mediæval maps, but not many; wikipedia lists many of them. Map-making as we understand it (a diagram showing geographical relationships) didn't really exist at that time (see here and here). As noted in the first link, information which we would now expect to see on a map was then more commonly put down in narrative form. It would be interesting if there were something like the Osma Beatus (see here or here) or the mappa mundi from Giraldus of Wales' Topographia Hibernica but with some land shown to the west / north-west (which would be the bottom-left on most mediæval maps, oriented east-up).
I've only read one entry so far, and this is already my favorite TL I've read this year! Subbed and looking forward to reading the rest!
Byzantine center is too far away to take advantage of this, and they'll have their hands full soon enough. And Chalemange seems likely to be butterflied away at this point. Frankish ascendancy still seemsnlikely, but not in precisely the same manner.
I agree about the Franks but it depends on how you want to do the butterflies. I can't see a little extra wealth in Ireland impacting mainland Europe that quickly. In that period Ireland was relatively isolated and much of the wealth would have been spent furthering feuds and minor political advancement rather than off-island expenditures. For narrative sake I think it would be reasonable for Europe to remain relatively unchanged for a few centuries.