Posted on 10/07/2021 7:57:16 PM PDT by Theoria
THAT VIKINGS crossed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus is well established. Their sagas told of expeditions to the coast of today’s Canada: to Helluland, which scholars have identified as Baffin Island or Labrador; Markland (Labrador or Newfoundland) and Vinland (Newfoundland or a territory farther south). In 1960 the remains of Norse buildings were found on Newfoundland.
But there was no evidence to prove that anyone outside northern Europe had heard of America until Columbus’s voyage in 1492. Until now. A paper for the academic journal Terrae Incognitae by Paolo Chiesa, a professor of Medieval Latin Literature at Milan University, reveals that an Italian monk referred to the continent in a book he wrote in the early 14th century. Setting aside the scholarly reserve that otherwise characterises his monograph, Mr Chiesa describes the mention of Markland (Latinised to Marckalada) as “astonishing”.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
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Who were the giants? Natives? Or Vikings?
The Vinland Map has recently been proved to be a fake - is this any different?
Maybe it’s my iPad. That link works but on the left side are ads going all the way down the page over the article so I can’t read it.
Maybe it’s my iPad. That link works but on the left side are ads going all the way down the page over the article so I can’t read it.
Ouch. My fault, the economist is paywall. But, the other link to paper is free. Look at freepmail in a bit.
Oh good grief duplicate post. Wanted to say I got the article, thank you. The part that has the ads is over the part in another language only.
Whew!
For a moment this was going to be about Milo Rambaldi...
That was close...
I’m not convinced from this article that it wasn’t something he invented. Who was going to prove him wrong?
This is a very interesting article. Thank you. This monk, Galvaneus, was pretty industrious.
What is funny is this translator, Ghioldi, had trouble translating the text because (like me) “…rather because he had to deal with inconsistent models: there is evidence that he used some incomplete and unfinished manuscripts by Galvaneus, which were sometimes difficult to read, enriched by marginal notes and slips”.
I hope Galvaneus or Ghioldi get a laugh out of that!
Great link. Thanks.
(“beyond the Ireland there is another smaller island, where no one ever dies. People at a very old age, however, if taken off the island, die immediately).”
😳
Same with me
By the 1300’s Vikings had travelled through out Europe, no doubt spreading tales of discoveries far and wide. That some monk heard and recorded such a tale about lands far to the west is hardly astonishing. In preprinting press days, no surprise that it never went anywhere.
As for “giants,” native Americans were of stature equal to the Vikings and taller than most southern europeans.
The part with the ads is only on the Latin part. Scroll down the rest of the article is ok.
We know THAT! They landed on Oak Island.
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