Posted on 10/13/2019 10:16:07 PM PDT by Salvation
Regardng Myths 1 and 7, Columbus wanted to prove you could get to the Far East by sailing west. If I remember correctly he spent some time in Ireland and found debris washed ashore that he felt came from the west and was not found in Europe. This is part of what convinced him to make the trip. Also he probably knew that Portuguese fishermen had been fishing in the Grand Banks off New England for a number of years. So far as his religious nature, Isabella and Ferdinand had just driven the Mores out of Granada and Spain, and as an Italian he certainly knew that they would be encouraged to finance his additional voyages if this would enable them to pursue their goal of restoring Christianity in places where it had been lost. So, good diplomacy and good religion.
PS: Thanks for another fine list of links.
That was certainly true in the US in the 19th Century. In Mexico in the 16th Century there were terrible plagues that killed millions of Indians. On the other hand Europeans learned the “pleasures” of Syphilis.
My daughter-in-law from Puerto Rico is mostly Hispanic heritage but she is also proud of her Taino heritage. Late in our marriage, my mother-in-law finally told my husband she was 1/8th Cree Indian, so my children are 1/32nd Cree, and one of their two sons looks like he got a fair bit of Indian from both parents.
I guess that makes sense.
A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas
A DNA Search for the First Americans Links Amazon Groups to Indigenous Australians
Thanks, I'd not heard the story about C in Ireland. Columbus went to Iceland as part of his research, his visit to Ireland may be why. If memory serves, the King and Queen of Spain had already turned him down, and he was packing to leave, to make his pitch somewhere else, when the Moors were finally expelled (last ruler Abdul Abdullah Boabdil; the anecdote was, he took a long look back at his former capital and wept, and his mother said, "don't weep like a woman for that which you could not defend like a man." There's nothing like a mother's love. ;^)
Anyway, the Reconquest was done, so the monarchs changed their minds and bankrolled Columbus. For his part, Columbus had studied the crap out of the whole thing, and accepted the view going back to ancient Greece that the known landmasses were all that existed, but the reports of the nearby landmasses to the west caused him to reject the estimate (also going back to ancient Greece) of the circumference of the Earth. After he made landfall in what turned out to be the Americas, he really thought he'd shrunk the Earth.
I used to know a guy online who had deep roots in Scandinavia; he claimed ancestors who, during the medieval warming period, had taken advantage of the 24 hour days of Arctic Ocean summer to trade with eastern Asia. That's pretty interesting, though anecdotal.
I was not sure if I remembered Ireland or Iceland, so Googled “Did Columbus travel to Ireland to research his travels.” Sure enough the first article listed was about Columbus taking an Irishman with him who had told of his own travels to land in the West. The second article is about a colony of Irish in the Carolinas that predated Columbus’ voyages. Farley was right!
They are trying to get rid of it.
Discovered from yesterday’s NY Post that most of the animosity against de Blasio at the parade was about the Cabrini statue.
Of course the cops are not exactly in love with him for other reasons.
That kinda rings a bell. I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been two-way traffic for a long, long time.
I Googled disease that killed many after cortez’s conquest of mexico. There were several articles on small pox and other European illnesses. Further down was the article below about the devastating epidemics of “cocoliztli” in 1545 and 1576 which was carefully described by Spanish priests and killed millions. One hundred years after Cortez, it is estimated that a population of 20 million had been reduced to 2 million. Interesting description of research seeking DNA of pathogens in teeth of skeletons in old cemetaries. A salmonella variety showed up repeatedly in teeth of victims buried at the time of a cocoliztli epidemic. Article points out that RNA bugs would not show up. It also mentions the potential for a lot of other historical epidemiological research.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/salmonella-cocoliztli-mexico/550310/
When were the Salamanca Catholics doing the intellectual development you describe in your comment? I wonder how that date period compares with the English Magna Carta, 1225 I think?
See here Vitoria Also School of Salamanca with attention to Francisco Suarez, who built on Vitoria.
Of course the history of human thought on justice has many "fathers." Vitoria and Suarez built on Aquinas, Aquinas on Augustine and Aristotle, etc. More modern theorists (Grotius, etc) built on their foundationss, often without acknowledging them.
I post this article from time to time:
Historical Review: Megadrought And Megadeath In 16th Century Mexico (Hemorrhagic Fever)
"The epidemic of cocoliztli from1545 to 1548 killed an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, or up to 80% of the native population of Mexico (Figure 1). In absolute and relative terms the 1545 epidemic was one of the worst demographic catastrophes in human history, approaching even the Black Death of bubonic plague, which killed approximately 25 million in western Europe from 1347 to 1351 or about 50% of the regional population. "
"The cocoliztli epidemic from 1576 to 1578 cocoliztli epidemic killed an additional 2 to 2.5 million people, or about 50% of the remaining native population."
One of the great tragedies of the world was the destruction of the Library at Alexandria.
I have just enjoyed reading your entire link on Mexican megadeath. I wonder if you have read the link I included in my Comment #90. It is quite exciting what can be done by searching for infective organizims in teeth using the bugs’ DNA. I am wondering if the hemorrhagic fevers, Hanta, Ebola, and others are all DNA bugs, or if some are RNA ones which the article I linked say were not studied (could not be studied??).
These HF type infections were in the highlands. The Aztecs were by a lake and it seems Smallpox was a significant killer, whereas the cocoliztli was a highland event associated with drought. Also the symptoms listed did not include pox which are quite definitive for smallpox.
I have had a specific interest in the influence of volcanoes on major climate events, so will do some research on the status of volcanoes in the 1500s. I remember wondering why the Carolingian Empire failed after the death of Charles the Great. Then I read in a book about food that in the century after his death there were about 30 famines some lasting 2 and 3 years. Part of this was caused by changes in agricultural conditions leading to more ergot fungus in northern Europe, and fungus from barberry bushes in southern Europe, those bushes being popular in Muslim cuisine. Later I discovered that there were an unusually large number of big volcanic events in that period.
536 A.D. the worst year in the history of the world
Very interesting.
Yes, that would be the year recorded by Cassiodorus. I have read several sources and the causes argument usually are volcanic air pollution, or meteor strike or air burst. Do you have an opinion or good links? Of course, 1816, the year with no summer in New England was pretty bad and blamed with good reason on the 1815 eruption of Tambora.
When I first read about it (and that was less than a year ago) I thought: If it was such a big event why didn't it make it big in the history books?
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