SoylentNews

"Marckalada" mentioned by 14th century Italian monk

takyon writes:

Genoan friar knew about America 150 years before Christopher Columbus

Sailors in Christopher Columbus's home town knew about North America more than a century before the explorer discovered the continent, Italian researchers have claimed.

An account by Genoan sailors of a verdant land beyond Greenland "where giants live" has been found in a history of the world written around 1340 by an Italian friar — 152 years before Columbus set foot in the Americas in 1492.

"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.

Journal Reference:
Paolo Chiesa. Marckalada: The First Mention of America in the Mediterranean Area (c. 1340), Terrae Incognitae (DOI: 10.1080/00822884.2021.1943792)

A Monk in 14th-century Italy Wrote About the Americas

upstart writes:

A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas:

In 2015 Mr Chiesa traced to a private collection in New York the only known copy of the Cronica universalis, originally written by a Dominican, Galvano Fiamma, between around 1339 and 1345. The book once belonged to the library of the basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan. In Napoleonic times, the monastery was suppressed and its contents scattered. The owner of the Cronica let Mr Chiesa photograph the entire book and, on his return to Milan, the professor gave the photographs to his graduate students to transcribe. Towards the end of the project one of the students, Giulia Greco, found a passage in which Galvano, after describing Iceland and Greenland, writes: "Farther westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds."

Mr Chiesa says that giants were a standard embellishment of faraway places in Norse folklore and, indeed, Galvano cautioned that "no sailor was ever able to know anything for sure about this land or about its features." The Dominican was scrupulous in citing his sources. Most were literary. But, unusually, he ascribed his description of Marckalada to the oral testimony of "sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway".

Mr Chiesa believes their accounts were probably passed on to Galvano by seafarers in Genoa, the nearest port to Milan and the city in which the Dominican monk is most likely to have studied for his doctorate.

Columbus a Genoese.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2