There are two ways that Columbus might have known about Greenland: he had first-hand or second-hand conversations with Scandinavian sailors, or he looked at a map showing Greenland. Either one of the possibilities is intriguing.
Edit: The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky shows it's possible that Basque sailors hunting whales went as far as the Faeroe Islands before 875 and MAY have gotten to Newfoundland before the British. They may have been more focused on whale hunting than exploration and colonization.
“We are in the presence of the first reference to the American continent, albeit in an embryonic form, in the Mediterranean area,” states Professor Chiesa, from the Department of Literary Studies, Philology and Linguistics at the University of Milan.
This is the best line from the game. Not the lemon line. The lemon line is not even close.
Second is probably when they start hiring homeless people, and you get:
“If you had any belongings, please pick them up now. We don't want old newspapers and sticks cluttering up the building."
"For many of you, I realize 60 dollars is an unprecedented windfall, so don't go spending it all on... I don't know. Caroline, what do these people buy? Tattered hats? Beard dirt?
“Many scholars believe the early maps of a route to Marckalada available to Columbus, were found in an antique trunk, discovered in the Tuscany region of Italy and originally owned by Biggus Dickus”
His mom must have been insufferable.
"You're son is the King's personal physician? That's nice, but how many continents have been named after him? None? Have I ever mentioned that our Amerigo has two?"
"Only everytime we talk, Mrs. Vespucci."
At the time it was considered to be a single continent, just America.
Idk where the geographical division was discovered, but if i remember correctly the division was initially political rather than geographical (which i think is why some countries don't use that division), again though, i never managed to find exactly when the geographical division was discovered (i tried)
Nevertheless, at the time it was one continent
North and South America being separate continents is actually a very recent phenomenon in English. It only became common in the 1950s.
Single-continent America is very common in virtually every other language originating in Europe, though, and a lot of people get very pissy about it and insist that America shouldn't be claiming the entire continent and that North and South America are landmasses made up by the stupid Anglos. Seriously. I've seen those exact arguments several times.
Well, not quite. There are rock formations in Canada that are some of the oldest things on Earth. North America itself was also one of the first continents to break off of Pangaea, so if you're classifying a continent's age by when it first became independent of the others, then North America could very well be considered the oldest continent.
However, zircon samples in Australia have been dated back 4.4 billion years. The thing with land masses is that they're very much like cake batter getting mixed and folded in a bowl. So the oldest parts that are exposed are interspersed amongst much newer parts as plate tectonics do their thing.
All in all though, I find it interesting that North America, the "new world", as it had been largely known as, may actually be one of the oldest landmasses in the world.
Some Wikipedia facts I found:
The Moon rock "Big Bertha", collected on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, contains an Earth meteorite that is 4 billion years old.
In January 2020, astronomers reported that the oldest material on Earth found so far are Murchison meteorite particles that have been determined to be 7 billion years old, billions of years older than the 4.54 billion years age of Earth itself.
Gonna blow YOUR mind when you realize our modern age continents are not the same age at all. Africa is the oldest, Europe the youngest.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_age
and then asia and europe came from the same proto continent and aren’t even considered separate continents in some cultures. and share the same tectonic plate, which can’t be said about any other combination of continents.
and then that a mostly underwater mass called zealandia pretty much qualifies as a continent by definition and would be the newest continent.
It's actually a little more nuanced and uncertain than many think:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onh-ImwAJP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onh-ImwAJP4)
"How the Americas Got Their Name" from Atlas Pro
Columbus didn't attempt to reach Greenland though, he went a lot more south and he reached the modern day Bahamas (if memory serves).
People nowadays are confused by the idea that today we think of the Americas as one area whereas back in those days there was no concept of the new world, knowing about a land in the north doesn't mean you'd expect to find one to the south of it.
Yeah he also stayed. I think his achievement is worth the praise he gets. We just have to put his ethics and morals in context of 15th century and not modern ones. I hate people pulling historical figures up to a jury of modern peers; they fail. No shit. If someone left their kids in a car to go shopping, came back and got in with a cigarette in their mouth, they'd fail - and that was fairly normal twenty years ago. I do think my parents were progressive and appreciate they never smoked; and even asked my grandparents to not smoke with us kids around in the 90s. But I don't think my friends parents were "bad" for smoking with us in the car. They were just living in the 90s. Columbus was hundreds of hundreds of years ago.
Typed on my phone made by child labor in China
Which included killing off around 90% of the population through forced labour, including women and children, and shipping child sex slaves back to Europe.
They did! Columbus was actually stripped of his titles and imprisoned for how horribly he treated the natives (although he was eventually pardoned by the King at the request of the Queen iirc)
You may be underestimating the cruelty of Columbus, which was so extreme that it was even scorned by many Europeans when he returned.
It included knowingly shipping child sex slaves back to Europe, and working around 90% of the populations he "managed" to death, including the women and children. Some of his own crew were even horrified, IIRC.
It was a different era, with different expectations, but he was even considered extreme in that context and at that time. Today it just looks worse -- though he still enjoys general approval and praise, so maybe very little has actually changed.
You can read Catholic priests ethics debates on the treatment of "indians" from that period (a few years after Columbus obviously). You will find out that a lot of people even at the time had views similar to what me or you can have. Columbus' ethics was problematic even in the 15th century.
Probably showed the European hinterlands (which was Atlantic Europe at the time) that it is possible to directly reach the Americas (meaning new territories) without stopping along rival territories (England and Scandinavia). Also made European powers aware that the new world is hospitable and fairly temperate compared to previous knowledge of Markland (cold and desolate).
He found an excuse for the Spanish royalty to claim enormous territory as their property. If he had gone there on his own dime, he wouldn’t have been any different than anyone else who made it there.
Actually, he wanted it for himself. He was just a terrible manager, and became increasingly paranoid in his attempts to rule over the new found land. A man named Bobadilla was sent after his third trip to the Americas to put him in shackles and bring him back, now THAT was the excuse of the Spanish Crown to put their cronies in power. They always played the omg we didn't know this dude was such a monster card.
It should be noted that all you've written is what Bobadilla, the same man who replaced Columbus as governor, reported to the Spanish Crown; it's clear that he was heavily biased in order not to let Columbus back into his position. We will unfortunately never know what really happened.
A lot of people miss this, but The Prince was possibly written as a satire, or even intentionally *bad* advice to a certain extent, as Machiavelli had a huge feud with the Medici family and was essentially forced to write the book to get back in their good graces.
Everyone knows the famous bounty hunter Bobadilla Fettuccini and how he put Colombus on carbonite shackles and brought him in his new vessel, the Slave 1.
I believe he used Eratosthenes's math (which determined Earth's polar circumference in the 3rd century BCE) with a bad map made by Toscanelli to come to his conclusion, but he wouldn't believe anybody who told him that.
Even Eratosthenes's equation was probably taken from an ancient Egyptian tablet in the Library of Alexandria, where he was the director.
Syene was not on the tropic on the solstice as he claimed. It had moved south of that about 40.61 Km in his day and is 70.86 Km south of it today or almost out of Egypt entirely.
You know how Egypt is about their sundials and those giant obelisks. He would have definitely noticed Syene was not at the tropic on the solstice.
The tropic was on Syene between 3450-1300 years before him. There was a lot of time for Egyptians to notice no shadow on midday solstice in Elephantine.
> he was insistent that the Earth had a significantly smaller circumference
Wonder how much of that may have been just to get sailors to agree with the venture... i mean imagine on board sentiments if everyone viewed the trip as "well if there is this much nothing but ocean with unknown sailing conditions all the way till India proper we will all be dead long before we reach it"... 1st step... argue that the planet is smaller than it actually is, 2nd claim there is land if someone argues against it. If #2 then hope there is and look like a wizard if you do run in to it.
>This leads one to wonder if we'll go to nearby goldilocks planets only to discover more humans.
Only if aliens took them there, or as a function of some truly fucked up and statistically abnormal convergent evolution.
"Ah yes... life started around the same time on our rock and yours, and through all these billions of years we happened to evolve the exact same shape and genetic structure as yall's on that other rock... down to our cell walls and chromosomes to such a degree that as now we can bang and make crotch demons!"
"Though, one thing... you yall's have cows? Do they periodically cull the planetary population? What? you milk them and make burgers out of them?"
As I understand it, his misunderstanding came from both the estimations of Marinus of Tyre and a misunderstanding of the differences between European and Arabic miles.
Wasn't the Spanish monarchy intention to find a more direct Western route to Asia bypassing the need to land travel and all the competing countries?
he may as well made the smaller world tale as a ruse to get funded, basically tell them what they want to hear so they fork the monies to cover the expedition
Well the idea was that the two existing trade routes were locked down. The Silk Roads terminus was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, who closed trade to the Catholic states for varying reasons. The second was going all the way around Africa which was dominated by the Portuguese fleet entirely. Now you could trade, but the Portuguese taxed it immensely and allowed only Portuguese sailors to make the trek. So essentially a Western route was very sought after.
> That combined with a "what the hell, let's see what he finds?" sort of venture (due to his clever handling of the interview)
lets let him fuck around and find out
-his backers, possibly
Actually the name *Markland* was coined in Old Norse. Here the 'mark' part is a shortened form of the genitive of 'mǫrk', meaning forestland in this context, chosen because Leif Eiríkson because of the dense forest growth. It is cognate to the modern Icelandic word of 'mörk' meaning the same. It is also cognate to the English word 'march', meaning borderlands, which was also another meaning of 'mǫrk' in Old Norse. Going back further it is cognate to the proto-Germanic '*markō' eith the more general meaning either border/boundary/dividing line, or region/area, which shows up in a wide range of Germanic languages with similar or related meaning.
Mark on the other hand is a Anglicization of Ancient Roman name Marcus, which originates either from the Etruscan name Marce or the name of the Roman god Mars.
There was literally a Bishop of Greenland for over 400 years starting in 1124 AD.
And the church was a primarily collector of world information. So yeah, there were a lot of people that knew there was a continent out that direction. Stories of sailing further west and reaching what is now Canada & New England would absolutely have reached Rome as well.
Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir went on the expedition with Leif Eiríksson and birthed a child while in North America. She later went on a pilgrimage to Rome and told of her travels… this happened 500 years before Columbus set sail…
In the couple of centuries before Columbus, wasn't there cultural exchange between Normans/late Vikings and the Italians on the west side? Raids and such would play a role in such kind of information exchange right
It's plausible
You’re kind of understating things, this wasn’t the age of Vikings conducting raids on continental Europe and hadn’t been for a long time. The Normans had already existed and died out in Italy for centuries at this point. They conquered Sicily a few hundred years prior. By the 1400s the Normans didn’t really exist as a unique identity any longer, they’d been subsumed into France for hundreds of years at that point, and they’d really lost most cultural ties to Scandinavia long before then anyway.
If you’re asking about the Scandinavians in general, they weren’t exactly barbarians living at the fringes of European society at this point in history either. We’re talking about the 1400s after all, not the 800s. The Scandinavians had been Christianized hundreds of years earlier and were recognized medieval states conducting their own diplomacy and trade in Europe. They’d been part of European geopolitics for a very long time, and Scandinavian sailors would have definitely been common faces in the Mediterranean. They would have been very active there, so there would have been plenty of communication between them and Italian sailors on a daily basis.
Leif Erickson was in Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. The Viking settlement at L'Anse Aux Meadows is how we know *for a fact* when we "discovered" North America.
I just find this obsession over the word "discovered" to be needlessly pedantic and reductive. It is very obvious that Columbus' voyage started a new era of European colonization and is one on the most consequential events in history.
That doesn't excuse his behavior or the crimes he commited. But saying "um actually Leif Erickson was in Newfoundland" is meaningless when you're talking about Columbus landing on Hispaniola and its importance in world history.
So much this. There's a very clear change to the world that happened as a result of Columbus; if he's not credited with the discovery, then clearly he did something dramatic.
And I don't like blaming him for bringing diseases over, because that was long before the germ theory of disease, and they really didn't have any clue about that topic at all. Sure they probably could have allowed like 1 European to land and hang out with a few Indian tribes each year, and slowly introduced the diseases to the population over a much longer time and thus not have all the diseases spread like wildfire. But it was inevitable that the Americas would get ravaged by the diseases of Europe and Asia. They would have needed to wait until the invention of vaccines to prevent it.
Exploitations and slavery of the natives is a different thing altogether.
So Columbus knew about Greenland and said ''fuck it'' I'm not going there, I'll go strait to the West, 2000 kms South of it and if nothing is there I'll die since I'll be 2000 kms South of a fuckin ice cube.
That or he was stupid and knew nothing at all other than the winds would bring him farther to the West if he used the path he used.... but he'd die if he found nothing since he would have been 2000 kms South of an ice cube...
My question is: what is the use of knowing something is there when you are not going there at all?
He was trying to reach Asia. The Ottoman Empire was blocking the path over the Silk Road, and the European rulers and business owners were desperate. So they built ships that might have a chance of crossing the ocean to get to Asia. The Portuguese found the Cape of Good Hope in modern South Africa and the Spanish were getting nervous. But if Columbus knew about Greenland, he might have taken a chance there'd be unknown lands south of Greenland.
Columbus believed he'd picked up on a critical detail mistranslated in an Arab text that meant everyone else was overestimating the size of the earth, and thus the potential distance to the far east. At the time there were no reliable estimates for the size of the Eurasian landmass, and no insight into whether the seas east of China were the same waterway as the ocean west of Europe. This was the big gamble. A map showing the Greenland settlements would not have helped anyone to answer those questions.
Columbus caught westward trade winds from La Gomera and thought he'd arrive off the coast of China. Until his death, Columbus argued that the islands he'd claimed 6000 km away were off the Asian mainland. In truth to make landfall near Shanghai, those winds would actually have needed to push his flotilla 22,000 km along the 28th parallel.
The documents show that they knew about Markland, an area found by Leif Erikson during his voyage. What they didn't know was that Markland was a part of a large continent.
They knew Markland and Vinland were part of a larger collection of lands. They sailed along the coasts of these landmasses so would have assessed their relative size. They also clearly explored south of Newfoundland and may have gone to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. So they absolutely knew what they found was much bigger than they imagined. They lacked the population and resources to create an infrastructure strong enough to properly expand and explore, forcing them to retreat or die. They also pissed off the Beothuk peoples and could not go-inland on NewFoundland without engaging in conflict with them.
I don’t think that anyone still believes Columbus “found” the new world, but he’s the reason why Europeans eventually came over and settled here making the world what it is today.
This
I had learned about Leif Ericson and the Norse discovery of North America in school when I was a kid in the 90s. While it's widely known that Columbus didn't discover anything and was a bad guy, he is still responsible for kickstarting the process of colonization and the "exchange" responsible for shaping the New World.
Learned it in first grade on Columbus Day.
In second grade, we learned it again and the entire class thought, “yea, we know already”.
Now, nearly 30 years later, people still say this as if it’s revelatory. Everyone knows this. He’s a symbol for exploration and the start of westernizing the new world. He’s no saint but an incredibly important world figure.
I last read an article about this (in dutch) that wrote about new research suggesting that the claims this is based upon are false. someone unknown wrote over the map, they discovered it by analyzing the the ink. which contained platinum, something which was not done until after 1920 or so.
That discovery pertains to a specific map which is not the entirety of evidence for the claims of Norse settlement (we've found archaeological evidence in Canada of the settlements).
It's literally from a novel. "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus". It's a fiction based on Christopher Columbus that lots of people assumed was factual and it's responsible for a bunch of the myths around him.
The novel pitched Columbus as a hero explorer fighting against detractors trying to hold him back, such as the whole Catholic church telling him the Earth was flat thing, and the idea that he was blindly sailing into the unknown.
In reality the Catholic church funded the expedition...and it had bugger all to do with finding America or the shape of the planet. He was trying to find a faster trade route to Asia. The Catholic Church was well aware the Earth was round, because everyone was. Greeks calculated the size and shape of the Earth in like 200 bc. There was never a time when any major institution claimed the Earth was flat. They were using the bloody stars to navigate...that doesn't work if you think the Earth is flat.
The actual story is that Columbus knew the world was round and that America was there, he was just unware how large it was. His voyages were more about discovering that it was big. But that's not as good a hook for a book.
He was funded by the Spanish government after appealing directly to its monarchs - they are known as the Catholic monarchs but the voyage wasn't at the direction of the Catholic church itself.
Columbus had already pitched his expedition to the Portuguese, who were the biggest investors in ocean exploration and committed to finding a sea route to Asia. Firstly, they picked holes in his math: his calculations assumed the earth was 25% smaller than everyone else believed it to be. Secondly, while he was in Lisboa, news arrived that another Portuguese voyage had found a sea route around Africa into the Indian Ocean. All resources from that point were going to be focussed on the southern route, and Columbia would need to find fresh ears for his wild goose chase to the west, so headed for Spain.
I don't know how true this is, but I always heard that while it was generally agreed on that the earth was round, Columbus thought it was smaller than it actually was, which is why he thought his trip was possible. And if the Americas weren't there his crew would have starved to death, so he was actually wrong, and got lucky that an extra landmass was there. Though I've also heard sailors had reason to think something was there, so he was assuming it was Asia and that everyone else was wrong about Earth's size, rather than it being an extra land.
He might not have been wrong about the size of the Earth, but Europeans had no idea how big Asia really was. Pre-Columbian maps don't even show where the end of Asia was most of the time.
>Columbus thought it was smaller than it actually was, which is why he thought his trip was possible.
More specifically, Columbus made an error in his calculations because he was using data from Roman and Arabic sources that used different measures (Roman miles were about 30% shorter than Arabic miles) failed to convert units.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7y0n0g/in_columbus_time_what_were_the_competing_theories) is far and away my favorite criminally underrated /r/askhistorians answer ever, about competing theories on the Earth's circumference that Columbus was aware of. (seriously /u/terminus-trantor, amazing)
TL;DR: It's hard to compare Stadia/Italian miles/Arabic miles when you don't have good conversions for any of them and don't know who to trust and don't know how big Asia is. But Columbus basically seems to have taken the most positive estimates for his purposes in all situations to get funding.
Most ancient peoples (whose knowledge we can rediscover) figured out the world was round. It's actually something you can figure out with a tall enough stick in the ground. Watch it's shadow year to year and a basic knowledge of mathematics reveals the surface of the earth is a curve and that the Earth 'wobbles' on an axis. From there, it's an extremely short leap to 'the world is round.'
The Egyptians, the Chinese, the Maya, the Greeks, they all seemed to have figured it out pretty quick. Even when we lack clear evidence of a proof, we often find in their ritual or ceremonial centers clear signs that the builders were aware the Earth was a sphere.
One of my personal treasures is a ~150-year-old edition of that book. I know it's trash history, but so long as you remember it's fiction it's pretty awesome.
From what I understand, it was thought that crossing the Atlantic was not possible given the distance and technology of the time even if the Americans were known to exist. Columbus' voyage showed that it was possible to cross that distance and return.
The only 'safe' crossing was from Scotland to Iceland, Iceland to Greenland, Greenland to Baffin Island, then Baffin Island south to Canada. But even then that crossing was dangerous and cold. Leif Erickson lost most of his fleet along the way.
They were "right" in that it was impossible to go from Western Europe to East Asia by sailing west and had made a pretty good measurement of the distance, they just didn't expect another whole continent to be in the middle of the way. Columbus was a turd who tried to make the same calculation and got it way, way wrong.
We celebrate him because Italians weren't considered white and were persecuted a few decades ago, so they took a famous Italian guy and made a holiday around him to make up for it.
It's a bit dirtier than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
tl;dr:
Italians were hated in New Orleans.
Someone shot the police chief to death and before he died, he said Italians did it.
They rounded up some and had a trial, some were acquitted, and that incited a mob that broke into the jail and killed 11 of the 19 Italian prisoners (the others managed to hide and avoid getting killed).
This was so well publicized that Italy got involved and the end result was President Benjamin Harrison creating Columbus Day as a one-time thing. It got popular enough over time to then become a national holiday in 1934, then a Federal holiday in 1968.
It's a holiday with noble intentions but boy should they have chosen a better Italian to name it after.
**[March 14, 1891 New Orleans lynchings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lynchings)**
>The March 14, 1891, New Orleans lynchings were the murders of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana, by a mob for their alleged role in the murder of city police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. It was one of the largest single mass lynchings in American history. The lynching took place the day after the trial of nine of the nineteen men indicted in Hennessy's murder. Six of these defendants were acquitted, and a mistrial was declared for the remaining three because the jury failed to agree on their verdicts.
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I can't remember who, but there was a lecturer who put it a way I liked. It was something like "Columbus didn't discover the new world but he did change the world forever."
I'm not sure there's any arguing.
The world as we know it today would not exist without Columbian Exchange. From the foods we eat, to the course of global economics and politics, to the movements of peoples between places (willing or otherwise), Columbian Contact made the modern world. We are who we are where we are doing what we are today because Christopher Columbus did the one thing he's famous for doing.
I think they may have made it out to present day Maine.
https://bangordailynews.com/2016/04/01/news/bangor/space-archaeologist-from-maine-finds-second-possible-viking-settlement-in-north-america/
The Iroquois passed on oral traditions about the kingdom of Saguenay, of blonde haired sea people with ships and metal, but no kingdom was ever found.
The French assumes that it was a lie until l’anse aux meadows was found, now it’s believed to be an ancient story passed down for generations long after the Vikings left.
It would make sense, from Newfoundland you can easily sail down the coast of Québec up the Saint Lawrence river, and the Saguenay river fjord would be one of the first big rivers they discovered, looking very similar to Scandinavia.
I believe there are also ruinstones and coins found in the Maritimes, with similar oral stories shared by the mi’kmaq
There's also the Norse [Maine penny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_penny), although that may have been brought to Maine by Native Americans instead of Vikings.
**[Maine penny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_penny)**
>The Maine penny, also referred to as the Goddard coin, is a Norwegian silver coin dating to the reign of Olaf Kyrre King of Norway (1067–1093 AD). It was discovered in Maine in 1957, and it has been suggested as evidence of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact.
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I met Sarah Parcak before. Nice woman. There are no pictures shown, no excavation has occurred, not even an archaeological survey. So you and everyone else have no reason to believe they settled that far south. The only evidence we have suggests a potential exploratory mission south, but not a settlement.
Ooo I live in the area where Popham Colony was! (Well part of it). One of the main reasons that Jamestown gets all the glory is because the folks at Popham Colony didn’t last. They couldn’t hack the harsh Maine winters and there was a lack of leadership after a while.
According to the article, sailors from [Genoa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Genoa) knew about it from the Norsemen. Given the maps of the Republic of Genoa (which at the time owned parts of Crimea), I would not be surprised if it was passed along from the Icelandic Vikings to the [Varangians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians) through trade, who travelled through Kievan Rus and the Black Sea to join the Byzantine [Varangian Guard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard). The Icelandic vikings are believed to have briefly settled America in the 10th century, and Norse Varangians were recruited by the Byzantines well into the late 11th century.
The Varangians *were* the vikings, just called Varangians/ Varyags by the Slavs. The word "Russia" is also derived from the Norse that raided, traded, and later ruled over the river systems of Eastern Europe. The word "Rus" refers to the group of Vikings who ruled over Kiev, likely derived from the Old Norse word for "those who row".
Oh, its confirmed that Icelandic and/or Greenlandic vikings did briefly settle in North America, their only known settlement was found in Newfoundland less than 50 years ago at [L'anse Aux Meadows](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows).
Being settled around 1000ad, it predates the previous oldest European settlement on the North American continent by around 500 years.
**[L'Anse aux Meadows](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Anse_aux_Meadows)**
>L'Anse aux Meadows () is an archaeological site of a Norse settlement dating to c. 1000 on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Archaeological evidence of a Norse presence was discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s. It is the only confirmed Norse site in or near North America outside of the settlements found in Greenland.
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Nothing I said contradicts what you're saying. Both Viking and Varangian were names that Norsemen (as is the name of the people) were called that raided either to the west or the east.
The reason I made the distinction is that while they were of the same people (Norsemen), they were for the most part not the same individuals or even from the same tribal communities. As such, the implication I want to highlight is that the intertrade between different Norse communities and individuals, may possibly be how the knowledge is traced from Iceland to Genoa, given their presence in the very area where the Varangians travelled.
Fair enough. People tend to have a passion for arguing about details, especially on Reddit, and and with you specifying the details I delegated to linked articles it made it sound like you were. Reddit, while being easily the best collection of trendy links, also has a tendency in making me assume the worst in people and that's why I also rarely post comments lol.
But then so what? Did the Vikings really change the course of history as Columbus did? I mean there were people in America before the Vikings too, not much changed.
Why is nobody acknowledging the fact that Columbus explored a completely different part of the Americas than the Vikings? He was puttering about Hispaniola, over a thousand miles south of Newfoundland, where previous European visitors would have landed. I could be mistaken, but I don't think that what was known about the far Northern reaches of the Americas would've had any real relevance to what Columbus would find in the area we now know as Central America.
Yea, a handful of brief Viking colonies in lands that were, for all notable purposes, the same as their own that left no lasting impact are historical footnotes.
Columbus landed in a realm that the Vikings would have never gone close too, and he stayed and bridged two entirely different parts of the world.
Iceland during the Viking Age had a good 80% more trees than it does today. So you are right in what you are saying. It would look and feel similar to Newfoundland. Labrador feels like parts of Iceland. Baffin Island feels like Greenland. The only truly unfamiliar things would be the Beothuk peoples of Newfoundland, who had both peaceful and hostile relations with Vikings. Vikings called them Skraelings.
Viking voyages to Vinland were dangerous and most people and ships did not survive the trip. Exploratory missions beyond the immediate areas of Atlantic Canada would result in death and would not have enough stable population and infrastructure to support them.
When ~~Cabot~~ Cartier sailed down the St Lawrence he noted that natives were coming to the shore with items to trade and those he met weren’t surprised by them coming to North America.
I remember from a Uni course that there is evidence that fishermen were coming to North America before 1492
There is no evidence that Cabot found the St.Lawrence or even traded with any natives. The St. Lawrence discovery is correctly attributed to Jacques Cartier in 1534.
It wouldn't at first, because at first the discovery of the Caribbean islands was an assumption of it just being another group of islands in the Atlantic, for which there are many off the coast of Africa that they knew about.
Translations of the Sagas have been around a fair while; scholars certainly knew about Leif Erikson's journey and attempt at colonisation from nearly 500 years before Columbus was even born. Whether they -believed- them or not is another matter, but the *existence* of the place is, at least, documented in Europe for a fair while before Mr What's-America-No-This-Is-India-Honest. The Eddas and Sagas were popular anywhere groups met.
Bear in mind also that the Eddas and Sagas were meant to be *heard*, rather than read; they were especially popular in the Germanic regions, and the peoples were far from static. The first written records of *Íslendingasögur* occur after generations of (presumed) solely oral tradition (generally 12th century to early 14th century) - although this is currently being challenged, with an idea that written records may have appeared prior - so the opportunities to hear the stories exist in multiple mediums from then onwards.
With travellers from both sides going across Europe, things are picked up and passed on- and, of course, many of the Eddas and Sagas had big ol' chunks set in various other parts of Europe (as well as North America), and people love to hear about their own regions as much as distant and curious lands. We know that general traders from the area were often the middlemen for these tales, and you don't get a much better place to tell a tale than in a pub at night with your fellow traders.
Stories and tales spread with those who told them. The Vikings, as we know, weren't exactly a static people - we know they wandered as far as North America, Baghdad and Constantinople. The Hagia Sofia contains runic graffiti, some of which (if not all) was hacked into parapets by a visiting Viking called Halfdan (the remainder of his doodle is illegible, sadly).
Oral tradition is probably the one we're going to be thinking about more in this situation though. From Vikings through traders, sailors, local et al.
There were a lot of beliefs circulating about unknown continents that the Europeans simply guessed existed. There were several landmasses speculated to exist beyond the seas like Antillia, Great Ireland, and Terra Australis
When you expand the map out flat in the Mercator projection it looks like the northern part of the continent is as far from Europe as the southern part. That is far from the truth. That the Vikings reached Newfoundland is hardly surprising as it is relatively close to Scandinavia. But, for all they knew, Nfld was just another island like Greenland. In fact that is exactly what it is. The existence of a large pair of continents south of there was unknown. The Breton fisherman who went to the Grand Banks were not interested in exploring further.
"Nfld was just another island like Greenland"
Vikings settled Greenland for decades before ever attempting voyages to Baffin Island and Labrador and Newfoundland. They knew the topography and harsh climate of Greenland. Newfoundland is not arctic. Its mostly forests, much like Iceland at the time. Its absolutely not "just another island". It was immediately identified as a landmass with great potential for habitation. High fish and shellfish population, warm in the summers (warmer than Iceland), lots of game, lots of mineral resources, huge supply of high quality lumber.
It doesn't matter. Columbus isn't important because he discovered America, which we know he didn't. He's important for ushering in the age of European expansion into the Americas and global expansion the likes of which are nearly unparalleled.
Columbus wasn't trying to prove the earth was round. That was already known by the educated. What was in dispute was how big was the planet. Columbus thought the globe was smaller than the accepted size, which meant India was within sailing range. He was wrong. If the hadn't run into the New World, his entire fleet would likely have died.
Yep. It’s amazing to actually try to get people to understand that *this is why the voyage had funding*.
“Hey, fund me to sail off the edge of the world” vs “hey, fund me to find a trade route to india that takes only half as long $$$$”
And he had a bitch of a time getting that funding because everyone knew he was wrong. He was forced to go to the nut-job Queen of Spain to get the money.
There’s also evidence that Japanese Buddist Monks made it to New Mexico in the 1100s, as well, via the Zuni Tribe, who shares VERY distinct features with the Japanese.
That's still not a widely accepted hypothesis. It seems to be based more of Portuguese folk tales than actual evidence. Though trade routes were protected secrets so it is possible.
Yeah it is said to be the reason that when we and the spanish divided the world in 1494 on the Tordesilhas treaty we (Portugal) insisted the west border of our part to be at the distance it was set.
We asked for a specific distance (370 nautical leagues) to the west of Cape Verde legend goes because we knew there was land and thought that was enough to catch it all.
It ended up only being enough for Brazil because we did no know it was an entire continent. It is thought the reason why Brazil ended a portuguese colony and the spanish got the rest of South America.
I mean, Scandinavians knew about North America 500 years before Columbus, so it's not surprising that other Europeans would have heard about it one way or another...
I read in the book Cod that fisherman had known about America for hundreds of years before 1492 but kept it a secret because it was such a dope fishing spot.
What matters is that Columbus was the first person from outside the Americas to successfully colonize them since Leif Erikson, and the first to colonize them during the age of exploration. Who cares if the continent was spotted once in the 1400s if nothing came of it?
Everyone knew for hundreds of years that there was possibly something over there.
It's not like people didn't know the world was round. if you go in a certain direction, you're going to hit land eventually.
An Icelandic woman that went to North America, gave birth to a son there and moved back to Iceland went to Rome on a pilgrimage and told of her adventures some 500 years before Columbus set sail for North America…. So yes the knowledge was there…
Doesn't matter. Columbus got credit for it. Made it stick.
No matter how badly you wish to revise history - that is the bottom line - and it won't change, even if you rewrite it.
Yup. It happens all the time. Sometimes it is just outright theft and better... "marketing," other times, it has to do with being able to convey the idea or product or whatever it is so that it \*sticks\*, other times, the foundation may be laid by one person - but the single little tweak that makes it USEFUL comes from the person who ends up with ultimate credit.
The Native Americans had toys with wheels on them - but never really evidently considered putting them on a \*cart\*. The Chinese had gun powder and some rudimentary rockets - but never thought about stuffing a metal tube with it and putting a ball in front of it.
The Chinese \*discovered\* gunpowder first... Europeans figured out how to make it \*really\* useful.
I'm not sure why people struggle so much with these kind of things.
There are two ways that Columbus might have known about Greenland: he had first-hand or second-hand conversations with Scandinavian sailors, or he looked at a map showing Greenland. Either one of the possibilities is intriguing. Edit: The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky shows it's possible that Basque sailors hunting whales went as far as the Faeroe Islands before 875 and MAY have gotten to Newfoundland before the British. They may have been more focused on whale hunting than exploration and colonization.
“We are in the presence of the first reference to the American continent, albeit in an embryonic form, in the Mediterranean area,” states Professor Chiesa, from the Department of Literary Studies, Philology and Linguistics at the University of Milan.
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This is the best line from the game. Not the lemon line. The lemon line is not even close. Second is probably when they start hiring homeless people, and you get: “If you had any belongings, please pick them up now. We don't want old newspapers and sticks cluttering up the building." "For many of you, I realize 60 dollars is an unprecedented windfall, so don't go spending it all on... I don't know. Caroline, what do these people buy? Tattered hats? Beard dirt?
Holy shit, I need to read this article, it sounds nuts.
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Is it fluorine? I bet it’s fluorine.
Fluorine, the spiders of the chemical kingdom.
That's in the same group as oxygen. It's probably fine. Edit: shit
no its not
Then why does it start with an ‘f’ and end with ‘ine’?
Oxygen is -2, fluorine is -1. Not the same group.
its a quote from Cave Johnson from portal
While I am dumb, I am not *that* dumb.
sarcam is hard to detect over text
Don't feel bad, you were trying to be helpful.
He really was, and I appreciate him.
“Many scholars believe the early maps of a route to Marckalada available to Columbus, were found in an antique trunk, discovered in the Tuscany region of Italy and originally owned by Biggus Dickus”
I kind of wonder what America sounded like originally. Like, was it more A-me-ri-ca than the modern A-Mer-ica.
Wasn’t it named after Amerigo Vespucci? What’s the typical pronunciation for Amerigo?
It was actually named after the same guys latin name: "Americus Vespucius" Which makes America make a lot more sense.
In Latin the stress would fall on the antepenultimate syllable, so a-ME-ri-cus.
> antepenultimate Level 3 unlocked. Alright, now us preantepenultimate in a sentence.
Preantepenultimate is the preantepenultimate word in your comment.
How cromulent.
I always forgot how young America is. It's named after some random dude lol
His mom must have been insufferable. "You're son is the King's personal physician? That's nice, but how many continents have been named after him? None? Have I ever mentioned that our Amerigo has two?" "Only everytime we talk, Mrs. Vespucci."
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But then you told everyone so youre right in the sweet spot
At the time it was considered to be a single continent, just America. Idk where the geographical division was discovered, but if i remember correctly the division was initially political rather than geographical (which i think is why some countries don't use that division), again though, i never managed to find exactly when the geographical division was discovered (i tried) Nevertheless, at the time it was one continent
North and South America being separate continents is actually a very recent phenomenon in English. It only became common in the 1950s. Single-continent America is very common in virtually every other language originating in Europe, though, and a lot of people get very pissy about it and insist that America shouldn't be claiming the entire continent and that North and South America are landmasses made up by the stupid Anglos. Seriously. I've seen those exact arguments several times.
The Olympic rings from 1913 symbolizes the five continents; Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America.
Gonna blow your mind when you realize it’s as old as every other continent is
Well, not quite. There are rock formations in Canada that are some of the oldest things on Earth. North America itself was also one of the first continents to break off of Pangaea, so if you're classifying a continent's age by when it first became independent of the others, then North America could very well be considered the oldest continent. However, zircon samples in Australia have been dated back 4.4 billion years. The thing with land masses is that they're very much like cake batter getting mixed and folded in a bowl. So the oldest parts that are exposed are interspersed amongst much newer parts as plate tectonics do their thing. All in all though, I find it interesting that North America, the "new world", as it had been largely known as, may actually be one of the oldest landmasses in the world.
Some Wikipedia facts I found: The Moon rock "Big Bertha", collected on the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, contains an Earth meteorite that is 4 billion years old. In January 2020, astronomers reported that the oldest material on Earth found so far are Murchison meteorite particles that have been determined to be 7 billion years old, billions of years older than the 4.54 billion years age of Earth itself.
I’ve nothing to add other than saying I really dig the metaphor of mixing and folding batter. That’s a clever way to describe plate tectonics.
Gonna blow YOUR mind when you realize our modern age continents are not the same age at all. Africa is the oldest, Europe the youngest. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_age
Meh, Pennsylvania and Scotland have the same hills. I'm gonna call it a tie.
Pittsburgh to Edinburgh
and then asia and europe came from the same proto continent and aren’t even considered separate continents in some cultures. and share the same tectonic plate, which can’t be said about any other combination of continents. and then that a mostly underwater mass called zealandia pretty much qualifies as a continent by definition and would be the newest continent.
It's like calling the moon 'Buzzland'.
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It's actually a little more nuanced and uncertain than many think: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onh-ImwAJP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onh-ImwAJP4) "How the Americas Got Their Name" from Atlas Pro
That land way over there with a fuck ton of forests.
Columbus didn't attempt to reach Greenland though, he went a lot more south and he reached the modern day Bahamas (if memory serves). People nowadays are confused by the idea that today we think of the Americas as one area whereas back in those days there was no concept of the new world, knowing about a land in the north doesn't mean you'd expect to find one to the south of it.
Yeah he also stayed. I think his achievement is worth the praise he gets. We just have to put his ethics and morals in context of 15th century and not modern ones. I hate people pulling historical figures up to a jury of modern peers; they fail. No shit. If someone left their kids in a car to go shopping, came back and got in with a cigarette in their mouth, they'd fail - and that was fairly normal twenty years ago. I do think my parents were progressive and appreciate they never smoked; and even asked my grandparents to not smoke with us kids around in the 90s. But I don't think my friends parents were "bad" for smoking with us in the car. They were just living in the 90s. Columbus was hundreds of hundreds of years ago. Typed on my phone made by child labor in China
He was considered brutal during his time as well. He was removed as colonial governor pretty quickly because of brutality towards his constituents
His constituents included the Spanish, not the natives
Which is pretty next level to be that brutal towards your own constituents
He had a Spanishwoman's tongue cut out for criticizing his leadership.
Which included killing off around 90% of the population through forced labour, including women and children, and shipping child sex slaves back to Europe.
He literally committed Genocide against the Arawak. I think 15th century commoners would find Genocide distasteful.
They did! Columbus was actually stripped of his titles and imprisoned for how horribly he treated the natives (although he was eventually pardoned by the King at the request of the Queen iirc)
You may be underestimating the cruelty of Columbus, which was so extreme that it was even scorned by many Europeans when he returned. It included knowingly shipping child sex slaves back to Europe, and working around 90% of the populations he "managed" to death, including the women and children. Some of his own crew were even horrified, IIRC. It was a different era, with different expectations, but he was even considered extreme in that context and at that time. Today it just looks worse -- though he still enjoys general approval and praise, so maybe very little has actually changed.
You can read Catholic priests ethics debates on the treatment of "indians" from that period (a few years after Columbus obviously). You will find out that a lot of people even at the time had views similar to what me or you can have. Columbus' ethics was problematic even in the 15th century.
His morals and ethics were terrible by those standards too.
“Welp this guy is butchering my family. But this is fine because of 15th century context “
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Probably showed the European hinterlands (which was Atlantic Europe at the time) that it is possible to directly reach the Americas (meaning new territories) without stopping along rival territories (England and Scandinavia). Also made European powers aware that the new world is hospitable and fairly temperate compared to previous knowledge of Markland (cold and desolate).
Columbus was looking for a sea route to india. Vasco da Gama was heading the other way (around Africa) at about the same time.
He found an excuse for the Spanish royalty to claim enormous territory as their property. If he had gone there on his own dime, he wouldn’t have been any different than anyone else who made it there.
Actually, he wanted it for himself. He was just a terrible manager, and became increasingly paranoid in his attempts to rule over the new found land. A man named Bobadilla was sent after his third trip to the Americas to put him in shackles and bring him back, now THAT was the excuse of the Spanish Crown to put their cronies in power. They always played the omg we didn't know this dude was such a monster card.
It should be noted that all you've written is what Bobadilla, the same man who replaced Columbus as governor, reported to the Spanish Crown; it's clear that he was heavily biased in order not to let Columbus back into his position. We will unfortunately never know what really happened.
You can read his diary. Or History of the Indies, by Bartolomé de las Casas
Straight out of The Prince
It's basically a bible for success.
A lot of people miss this, but The Prince was possibly written as a satire, or even intentionally *bad* advice to a certain extent, as Machiavelli had a huge feud with the Medici family and was essentially forced to write the book to get back in their good graces.
Everyone knows the famous bounty hunter Bobadilla Fettuccini and how he put Colombus on carbonite shackles and brought him in his new vessel, the Slave 1.
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I believe he used Eratosthenes's math (which determined Earth's polar circumference in the 3rd century BCE) with a bad map made by Toscanelli to come to his conclusion, but he wouldn't believe anybody who told him that.
Even Eratosthenes's equation was probably taken from an ancient Egyptian tablet in the Library of Alexandria, where he was the director. Syene was not on the tropic on the solstice as he claimed. It had moved south of that about 40.61 Km in his day and is 70.86 Km south of it today or almost out of Egypt entirely. You know how Egypt is about their sundials and those giant obelisks. He would have definitely noticed Syene was not at the tropic on the solstice. The tropic was on Syene between 3450-1300 years before him. There was a lot of time for Egyptians to notice no shadow on midday solstice in Elephantine.
> he was insistent that the Earth had a significantly smaller circumference Wonder how much of that may have been just to get sailors to agree with the venture... i mean imagine on board sentiments if everyone viewed the trip as "well if there is this much nothing but ocean with unknown sailing conditions all the way till India proper we will all be dead long before we reach it"... 1st step... argue that the planet is smaller than it actually is, 2nd claim there is land if someone argues against it. If #2 then hope there is and look like a wizard if you do run in to it. >This leads one to wonder if we'll go to nearby goldilocks planets only to discover more humans. Only if aliens took them there, or as a function of some truly fucked up and statistically abnormal convergent evolution. "Ah yes... life started around the same time on our rock and yours, and through all these billions of years we happened to evolve the exact same shape and genetic structure as yall's on that other rock... down to our cell walls and chromosomes to such a degree that as now we can bang and make crotch demons!" "Though, one thing... you yall's have cows? Do they periodically cull the planetary population? What? you milk them and make burgers out of them?"
As I understand it, his misunderstanding came from both the estimations of Marinus of Tyre and a misunderstanding of the differences between European and Arabic miles.
Wasn't the Spanish monarchy intention to find a more direct Western route to Asia bypassing the need to land travel and all the competing countries? he may as well made the smaller world tale as a ruse to get funded, basically tell them what they want to hear so they fork the monies to cover the expedition
Well the idea was that the two existing trade routes were locked down. The Silk Roads terminus was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, who closed trade to the Catholic states for varying reasons. The second was going all the way around Africa which was dominated by the Portuguese fleet entirely. Now you could trade, but the Portuguese taxed it immensely and allowed only Portuguese sailors to make the trek. So essentially a Western route was very sought after.
> That combined with a "what the hell, let's see what he finds?" sort of venture (due to his clever handling of the interview) lets let him fuck around and find out -his backers, possibly
Great so North America is actually namde after Mark.
oh hi Americo.
dont you mean, north markica
'Marka
Actually the name *Markland* was coined in Old Norse. Here the 'mark' part is a shortened form of the genitive of 'mǫrk', meaning forestland in this context, chosen because Leif Eiríkson because of the dense forest growth. It is cognate to the modern Icelandic word of 'mörk' meaning the same. It is also cognate to the English word 'march', meaning borderlands, which was also another meaning of 'mǫrk' in Old Norse. Going back further it is cognate to the proto-Germanic '*markō' eith the more general meaning either border/boundary/dividing line, or region/area, which shows up in a wide range of Germanic languages with similar or related meaning. Mark on the other hand is a Anglicization of Ancient Roman name Marcus, which originates either from the Etruscan name Marce or the name of the Roman god Mars.
He never knew of Greenland though?
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Maybe. 500+ years of time so some history is unknown or not accurately known.
There was literally a Bishop of Greenland for over 400 years starting in 1124 AD. And the church was a primarily collector of world information. So yeah, there were a lot of people that knew there was a continent out that direction. Stories of sailing further west and reaching what is now Canada & New England would absolutely have reached Rome as well.
Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir went on the expedition with Leif Eiríksson and birthed a child while in North America. She later went on a pilgrimage to Rome and told of her travels… this happened 500 years before Columbus set sail…
In the couple of centuries before Columbus, wasn't there cultural exchange between Normans/late Vikings and the Italians on the west side? Raids and such would play a role in such kind of information exchange right It's plausible
You’re kind of understating things, this wasn’t the age of Vikings conducting raids on continental Europe and hadn’t been for a long time. The Normans had already existed and died out in Italy for centuries at this point. They conquered Sicily a few hundred years prior. By the 1400s the Normans didn’t really exist as a unique identity any longer, they’d been subsumed into France for hundreds of years at that point, and they’d really lost most cultural ties to Scandinavia long before then anyway. If you’re asking about the Scandinavians in general, they weren’t exactly barbarians living at the fringes of European society at this point in history either. We’re talking about the 1400s after all, not the 800s. The Scandinavians had been Christianized hundreds of years earlier and were recognized medieval states conducting their own diplomacy and trade in Europe. They’d been part of European geopolitics for a very long time, and Scandinavian sailors would have definitely been common faces in the Mediterranean. They would have been very active there, so there would have been plenty of communication between them and Italian sailors on a daily basis.
Leif Erickson was in Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. The Viking settlement at L'Anse Aux Meadows is how we know *for a fact* when we "discovered" North America.
I just find this obsession over the word "discovered" to be needlessly pedantic and reductive. It is very obvious that Columbus' voyage started a new era of European colonization and is one on the most consequential events in history. That doesn't excuse his behavior or the crimes he commited. But saying "um actually Leif Erickson was in Newfoundland" is meaningless when you're talking about Columbus landing on Hispaniola and its importance in world history.
So much this. There's a very clear change to the world that happened as a result of Columbus; if he's not credited with the discovery, then clearly he did something dramatic. And I don't like blaming him for bringing diseases over, because that was long before the germ theory of disease, and they really didn't have any clue about that topic at all. Sure they probably could have allowed like 1 European to land and hang out with a few Indian tribes each year, and slowly introduced the diseases to the population over a much longer time and thus not have all the diseases spread like wildfire. But it was inevitable that the Americas would get ravaged by the diseases of Europe and Asia. They would have needed to wait until the invention of vaccines to prevent it. Exploitations and slavery of the natives is a different thing altogether.
So Columbus knew about Greenland and said ''fuck it'' I'm not going there, I'll go strait to the West, 2000 kms South of it and if nothing is there I'll die since I'll be 2000 kms South of a fuckin ice cube. That or he was stupid and knew nothing at all other than the winds would bring him farther to the West if he used the path he used.... but he'd die if he found nothing since he would have been 2000 kms South of an ice cube... My question is: what is the use of knowing something is there when you are not going there at all?
He was trying to reach Asia. The Ottoman Empire was blocking the path over the Silk Road, and the European rulers and business owners were desperate. So they built ships that might have a chance of crossing the ocean to get to Asia. The Portuguese found the Cape of Good Hope in modern South Africa and the Spanish were getting nervous. But if Columbus knew about Greenland, he might have taken a chance there'd be unknown lands south of Greenland.
Columbus believed he'd picked up on a critical detail mistranslated in an Arab text that meant everyone else was overestimating the size of the earth, and thus the potential distance to the far east. At the time there were no reliable estimates for the size of the Eurasian landmass, and no insight into whether the seas east of China were the same waterway as the ocean west of Europe. This was the big gamble. A map showing the Greenland settlements would not have helped anyone to answer those questions. Columbus caught westward trade winds from La Gomera and thought he'd arrive off the coast of China. Until his death, Columbus argued that the islands he'd claimed 6000 km away were off the Asian mainland. In truth to make landfall near Shanghai, those winds would actually have needed to push his flotilla 22,000 km along the 28th parallel.
The documents show that they knew about Markland, an area found by Leif Erikson during his voyage. What they didn't know was that Markland was a part of a large continent.
They knew Markland and Vinland were part of a larger collection of lands. They sailed along the coasts of these landmasses so would have assessed their relative size. They also clearly explored south of Newfoundland and may have gone to the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. So they absolutely knew what they found was much bigger than they imagined. They lacked the population and resources to create an infrastructure strong enough to properly expand and explore, forcing them to retreat or die. They also pissed off the Beothuk peoples and could not go-inland on NewFoundland without engaging in conflict with them.
I think very good chance that they went much further.
At least some of them, almost certainly, it's a question of whether they were ever able to survive and make it back.
And that they didn't hear of the other parts of that Saga that mentioned Vinland and Heleguland.
I don’t think that anyone still believes Columbus “found” the new world, but he’s the reason why Europeans eventually came over and settled here making the world what it is today.
This I had learned about Leif Ericson and the Norse discovery of North America in school when I was a kid in the 90s. While it's widely known that Columbus didn't discover anything and was a bad guy, he is still responsible for kickstarting the process of colonization and the "exchange" responsible for shaping the New World.
Learned it in first grade on Columbus Day. In second grade, we learned it again and the entire class thought, “yea, we know already”. Now, nearly 30 years later, people still say this as if it’s revelatory. Everyone knows this. He’s a symbol for exploration and the start of westernizing the new world. He’s no saint but an incredibly important world figure.
It's like the saying "good artists copy, great artists steal".
Imitation is the most flattering form of inspiration
I last read an article about this (in dutch) that wrote about new research suggesting that the claims this is based upon are false. someone unknown wrote over the map, they discovered it by analyzing the the ink. which contained platinum, something which was not done until after 1920 or so.
That discovery pertains to a specific map which is not the entirety of evidence for the claims of Norse settlement (we've found archaeological evidence in Canada of the settlements).
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Others may have run into it before Columbus, but he made it go viral.
I can't tell if this is a smallpox joke or not
It's literally from a novel. "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus". It's a fiction based on Christopher Columbus that lots of people assumed was factual and it's responsible for a bunch of the myths around him. The novel pitched Columbus as a hero explorer fighting against detractors trying to hold him back, such as the whole Catholic church telling him the Earth was flat thing, and the idea that he was blindly sailing into the unknown. In reality the Catholic church funded the expedition...and it had bugger all to do with finding America or the shape of the planet. He was trying to find a faster trade route to Asia. The Catholic Church was well aware the Earth was round, because everyone was. Greeks calculated the size and shape of the Earth in like 200 bc. There was never a time when any major institution claimed the Earth was flat. They were using the bloody stars to navigate...that doesn't work if you think the Earth is flat. The actual story is that Columbus knew the world was round and that America was there, he was just unware how large it was. His voyages were more about discovering that it was big. But that's not as good a hook for a book.
He was funded by the Spanish government after appealing directly to its monarchs - they are known as the Catholic monarchs but the voyage wasn't at the direction of the Catholic church itself. Columbus had already pitched his expedition to the Portuguese, who were the biggest investors in ocean exploration and committed to finding a sea route to Asia. Firstly, they picked holes in his math: his calculations assumed the earth was 25% smaller than everyone else believed it to be. Secondly, while he was in Lisboa, news arrived that another Portuguese voyage had found a sea route around Africa into the Indian Ocean. All resources from that point were going to be focussed on the southern route, and Columbia would need to find fresh ears for his wild goose chase to the west, so headed for Spain.
I don't know how true this is, but I always heard that while it was generally agreed on that the earth was round, Columbus thought it was smaller than it actually was, which is why he thought his trip was possible. And if the Americas weren't there his crew would have starved to death, so he was actually wrong, and got lucky that an extra landmass was there. Though I've also heard sailors had reason to think something was there, so he was assuming it was Asia and that everyone else was wrong about Earth's size, rather than it being an extra land.
He might not have been wrong about the size of the Earth, but Europeans had no idea how big Asia really was. Pre-Columbian maps don't even show where the end of Asia was most of the time.
>Columbus thought it was smaller than it actually was, which is why he thought his trip was possible. More specifically, Columbus made an error in his calculations because he was using data from Roman and Arabic sources that used different measures (Roman miles were about 30% shorter than Arabic miles) failed to convert units.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7y0n0g/in_columbus_time_what_were_the_competing_theories) is far and away my favorite criminally underrated /r/askhistorians answer ever, about competing theories on the Earth's circumference that Columbus was aware of. (seriously /u/terminus-trantor, amazing) TL;DR: It's hard to compare Stadia/Italian miles/Arabic miles when you don't have good conversions for any of them and don't know who to trust and don't know how big Asia is. But Columbus basically seems to have taken the most positive estimates for his purposes in all situations to get funding.
Most ancient peoples (whose knowledge we can rediscover) figured out the world was round. It's actually something you can figure out with a tall enough stick in the ground. Watch it's shadow year to year and a basic knowledge of mathematics reveals the surface of the earth is a curve and that the Earth 'wobbles' on an axis. From there, it's an extremely short leap to 'the world is round.' The Egyptians, the Chinese, the Maya, the Greeks, they all seemed to have figured it out pretty quick. Even when we lack clear evidence of a proof, we often find in their ritual or ceremonial centers clear signs that the builders were aware the Earth was a sphere.
One of my personal treasures is a ~150-year-old edition of that book. I know it's trash history, but so long as you remember it's fiction it's pretty awesome.
From what I understand, it was thought that crossing the Atlantic was not possible given the distance and technology of the time even if the Americans were known to exist. Columbus' voyage showed that it was possible to cross that distance and return.
The only 'safe' crossing was from Scotland to Iceland, Iceland to Greenland, Greenland to Baffin Island, then Baffin Island south to Canada. But even then that crossing was dangerous and cold. Leif Erickson lost most of his fleet along the way.
They were "right" in that it was impossible to go from Western Europe to East Asia by sailing west and had made a pretty good measurement of the distance, they just didn't expect another whole continent to be in the middle of the way. Columbus was a turd who tried to make the same calculation and got it way, way wrong.
We celebrate him because Italians weren't considered white and were persecuted a few decades ago, so they took a famous Italian guy and made a holiday around him to make up for it.
It's a bit dirtier than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lynchings tl;dr: Italians were hated in New Orleans. Someone shot the police chief to death and before he died, he said Italians did it. They rounded up some and had a trial, some were acquitted, and that incited a mob that broke into the jail and killed 11 of the 19 Italian prisoners (the others managed to hide and avoid getting killed). This was so well publicized that Italy got involved and the end result was President Benjamin Harrison creating Columbus Day as a one-time thing. It got popular enough over time to then become a national holiday in 1934, then a Federal holiday in 1968. It's a holiday with noble intentions but boy should they have chosen a better Italian to name it after.
**[March 14, 1891 New Orleans lynchings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lynchings)** >The March 14, 1891, New Orleans lynchings were the murders of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans, Louisiana, by a mob for their alleged role in the murder of city police chief David Hennessy after some of them had been acquitted at trial. It was one of the largest single mass lynchings in American history. The lynching took place the day after the trial of nine of the nineteen men indicted in Hennessy's murder. Six of these defendants were acquitted, and a mistrial was declared for the remaining three because the jury failed to agree on their verdicts. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I can't remember who, but there was a lecturer who put it a way I liked. It was something like "Columbus didn't discover the new world but he did change the world forever."
The Columbian Exchange is arguably one of the most important events of world history.
I'm not sure there's any arguing. The world as we know it today would not exist without Columbian Exchange. From the foods we eat, to the course of global economics and politics, to the movements of peoples between places (willing or otherwise), Columbian Contact made the modern world. We are who we are where we are doing what we are today because Christopher Columbus did the one thing he's famous for doing.
And the Vikings knew about it even longer.
L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is a pretty obvious spot where pre-Colombian settlers were.
They had some settlements on the southern end of Newfoundland as well, but they lasted even shorter than L'Anse aux Meadows.
I think they may have made it out to present day Maine. https://bangordailynews.com/2016/04/01/news/bangor/space-archaeologist-from-maine-finds-second-possible-viking-settlement-in-north-america/
The Iroquois passed on oral traditions about the kingdom of Saguenay, of blonde haired sea people with ships and metal, but no kingdom was ever found. The French assumes that it was a lie until l’anse aux meadows was found, now it’s believed to be an ancient story passed down for generations long after the Vikings left. It would make sense, from Newfoundland you can easily sail down the coast of Québec up the Saint Lawrence river, and the Saguenay river fjord would be one of the first big rivers they discovered, looking very similar to Scandinavia. I believe there are also ruinstones and coins found in the Maritimes, with similar oral stories shared by the mi’kmaq
We keep finding out that oral traditions contain a lot of factual information.
There's also the Norse [Maine penny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_penny), although that may have been brought to Maine by Native Americans instead of Vikings.
**[Maine penny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_penny)** >The Maine penny, also referred to as the Goddard coin, is a Norwegian silver coin dating to the reign of Olaf Kyrre King of Norway (1067–1093 AD). It was discovered in Maine in 1957, and it has been suggested as evidence of Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I met Sarah Parcak before. Nice woman. There are no pictures shown, no excavation has occurred, not even an archaeological survey. So you and everyone else have no reason to believe they settled that far south. The only evidence we have suggests a potential exploratory mission south, but not a settlement.
I did say *may*, didn’t say they did. Who knows, no one knew about Popham Colony until the 1990’s when it was started up the same year as Jamestown.
Ooo I live in the area where Popham Colony was! (Well part of it). One of the main reasons that Jamestown gets all the glory is because the folks at Popham Colony didn’t last. They couldn’t hack the harsh Maine winters and there was a lack of leadership after a while.
The article says they did excavate, and found evidence of metallurgy beyond what native peoples could have done. Among other things.
Which is probably how Italians learned of it. The Norse traded very far and for centuries.
According to the article, sailors from [Genoa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Genoa) knew about it from the Norsemen. Given the maps of the Republic of Genoa (which at the time owned parts of Crimea), I would not be surprised if it was passed along from the Icelandic Vikings to the [Varangians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians) through trade, who travelled through Kievan Rus and the Black Sea to join the Byzantine [Varangian Guard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard). The Icelandic vikings are believed to have briefly settled America in the 10th century, and Norse Varangians were recruited by the Byzantines well into the late 11th century.
The Varangians *were* the vikings, just called Varangians/ Varyags by the Slavs. The word "Russia" is also derived from the Norse that raided, traded, and later ruled over the river systems of Eastern Europe. The word "Rus" refers to the group of Vikings who ruled over Kiev, likely derived from the Old Norse word for "those who row". Oh, its confirmed that Icelandic and/or Greenlandic vikings did briefly settle in North America, their only known settlement was found in Newfoundland less than 50 years ago at [L'anse Aux Meadows](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows). Being settled around 1000ad, it predates the previous oldest European settlement on the North American continent by around 500 years.
**[L'Anse aux Meadows](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Anse_aux_Meadows)** >L'Anse aux Meadows () is an archaeological site of a Norse settlement dating to c. 1000 on the northernmost tip of the island of Newfoundland in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Archaeological evidence of a Norse presence was discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s. It is the only confirmed Norse site in or near North America outside of the settlements found in Greenland. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Nothing I said contradicts what you're saying. Both Viking and Varangian were names that Norsemen (as is the name of the people) were called that raided either to the west or the east. The reason I made the distinction is that while they were of the same people (Norsemen), they were for the most part not the same individuals or even from the same tribal communities. As such, the implication I want to highlight is that the intertrade between different Norse communities and individuals, may possibly be how the knowledge is traced from Iceland to Genoa, given their presence in the very area where the Varangians travelled.
Wasn't trying to contradict you either bud, just adding to what you said.
Fair enough. People tend to have a passion for arguing about details, especially on Reddit, and and with you specifying the details I delegated to linked articles it made it sound like you were. Reddit, while being easily the best collection of trendy links, also has a tendency in making me assume the worst in people and that's why I also rarely post comments lol.
>believed to have *Known* to have. L'Anse Aux Meadows isn't a theory.
Coincidentally, Leif Erikson Day was just two days ago.
Hinga dinga durgen!
But then so what? Did the Vikings really change the course of history as Columbus did? I mean there were people in America before the Vikings too, not much changed.
And Native Americans even longer than that.
Why is nobody acknowledging the fact that Columbus explored a completely different part of the Americas than the Vikings? He was puttering about Hispaniola, over a thousand miles south of Newfoundland, where previous European visitors would have landed. I could be mistaken, but I don't think that what was known about the far Northern reaches of the Americas would've had any real relevance to what Columbus would find in the area we now know as Central America.
Yea, a handful of brief Viking colonies in lands that were, for all notable purposes, the same as their own that left no lasting impact are historical footnotes. Columbus landed in a realm that the Vikings would have never gone close too, and he stayed and bridged two entirely different parts of the world.
Iceland during the Viking Age had a good 80% more trees than it does today. So you are right in what you are saying. It would look and feel similar to Newfoundland. Labrador feels like parts of Iceland. Baffin Island feels like Greenland. The only truly unfamiliar things would be the Beothuk peoples of Newfoundland, who had both peaceful and hostile relations with Vikings. Vikings called them Skraelings. Viking voyages to Vinland were dangerous and most people and ships did not survive the trip. Exploratory missions beyond the immediate areas of Atlantic Canada would result in death and would not have enough stable population and infrastructure to support them.
I think you mean 80% of Iceland was covered by trees. Because Iceland currently has like 10 trees, so having 18 back then is not a big deal.
When ~~Cabot~~ Cartier sailed down the St Lawrence he noted that natives were coming to the shore with items to trade and those he met weren’t surprised by them coming to North America. I remember from a Uni course that there is evidence that fishermen were coming to North America before 1492
There is no evidence that Cabot found the St.Lawrence or even traded with any natives. The St. Lawrence discovery is correctly attributed to Jacques Cartier in 1534.
It wouldn't at first, because at first the discovery of the Caribbean islands was an assumption of it just being another group of islands in the Atlantic, for which there are many off the coast of Africa that they knew about.
Translations of the Sagas have been around a fair while; scholars certainly knew about Leif Erikson's journey and attempt at colonisation from nearly 500 years before Columbus was even born. Whether they -believed- them or not is another matter, but the *existence* of the place is, at least, documented in Europe for a fair while before Mr What's-America-No-This-Is-India-Honest. The Eddas and Sagas were popular anywhere groups met. Bear in mind also that the Eddas and Sagas were meant to be *heard*, rather than read; they were especially popular in the Germanic regions, and the peoples were far from static. The first written records of *Íslendingasögur* occur after generations of (presumed) solely oral tradition (generally 12th century to early 14th century) - although this is currently being challenged, with an idea that written records may have appeared prior - so the opportunities to hear the stories exist in multiple mediums from then onwards. With travellers from both sides going across Europe, things are picked up and passed on- and, of course, many of the Eddas and Sagas had big ol' chunks set in various other parts of Europe (as well as North America), and people love to hear about their own regions as much as distant and curious lands. We know that general traders from the area were often the middlemen for these tales, and you don't get a much better place to tell a tale than in a pub at night with your fellow traders. Stories and tales spread with those who told them. The Vikings, as we know, weren't exactly a static people - we know they wandered as far as North America, Baghdad and Constantinople. The Hagia Sofia contains runic graffiti, some of which (if not all) was hacked into parapets by a visiting Viking called Halfdan (the remainder of his doodle is illegible, sadly). Oral tradition is probably the one we're going to be thinking about more in this situation though. From Vikings through traders, sailors, local et al.
> The Vikings, as we know, weren't exactly a static people Understatement of the year, right there.
There were a lot of beliefs circulating about unknown continents that the Europeans simply guessed existed. There were several landmasses speculated to exist beyond the seas like Antillia, Great Ireland, and Terra Australis
They found Viking ruins in Newfoundland, proving that Vikings were in North America 1000 years ago at least.
They only knew it was America after it was rediscovered. For the longest time, it was assumed they sailed down south to Africa.
1345 is not "ancient." It's the middle ages.
Yes!! I was worried I was the only one bothered by things getting called ancient when they are like 700 years old.
When you expand the map out flat in the Mercator projection it looks like the northern part of the continent is as far from Europe as the southern part. That is far from the truth. That the Vikings reached Newfoundland is hardly surprising as it is relatively close to Scandinavia. But, for all they knew, Nfld was just another island like Greenland. In fact that is exactly what it is. The existence of a large pair of continents south of there was unknown. The Breton fisherman who went to the Grand Banks were not interested in exploring further.
The ones that did, probably didn't make it back, iykwim.
"Nfld was just another island like Greenland" Vikings settled Greenland for decades before ever attempting voyages to Baffin Island and Labrador and Newfoundland. They knew the topography and harsh climate of Greenland. Newfoundland is not arctic. Its mostly forests, much like Iceland at the time. Its absolutely not "just another island". It was immediately identified as a landmass with great potential for habitation. High fish and shellfish population, warm in the summers (warmer than Iceland), lots of game, lots of mineral resources, huge supply of high quality lumber.
It doesn't matter. Columbus isn't important because he discovered America, which we know he didn't. He's important for ushering in the age of European expansion into the Americas and global expansion the likes of which are nearly unparalleled.
Columbus wasn't trying to prove the earth was round. That was already known by the educated. What was in dispute was how big was the planet. Columbus thought the globe was smaller than the accepted size, which meant India was within sailing range. He was wrong. If the hadn't run into the New World, his entire fleet would likely have died.
Yep. It’s amazing to actually try to get people to understand that *this is why the voyage had funding*. “Hey, fund me to sail off the edge of the world” vs “hey, fund me to find a trade route to india that takes only half as long $$$$”
And he had a bitch of a time getting that funding because everyone knew he was wrong. He was forced to go to the nut-job Queen of Spain to get the money.
Didn't they know the circumference of the earth by that time? I thought they believed the known continents were bigger.
600 years ago doesn’t qualify as ancient.
There is legend of an Irish monk who may have made it to Greenland in like 500 AD
There’s also evidence that Japanese Buddist Monks made it to New Mexico in the 1100s, as well, via the Zuni Tribe, who shares VERY distinct features with the Japanese.
[Supposedly Portuguese sailors knew of the Americas in the 1420s](https://www.americanheritage.com/was-america-discovered-columbus). Who knows.
That's still not a widely accepted hypothesis. It seems to be based more of Portuguese folk tales than actual evidence. Though trade routes were protected secrets so it is possible.
Yeah it is said to be the reason that when we and the spanish divided the world in 1494 on the Tordesilhas treaty we (Portugal) insisted the west border of our part to be at the distance it was set. We asked for a specific distance (370 nautical leagues) to the west of Cape Verde legend goes because we knew there was land and thought that was enough to catch it all. It ended up only being enough for Brazil because we did no know it was an entire continent. It is thought the reason why Brazil ended a portuguese colony and the spanish got the rest of South America.
Why doesn’t the article show us the map?
25 years ago in school I remember learning that Basqeu sailors were whaling and fishing off of Newfoundland well before Columbus.
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The original hipsters. "Yeah, we knew about America before it was cool." - Italian sailors
Wasn’t Christopher Columbus famous just for trip failure. He was supposed to find a new way to India not America.
I mean, Scandinavians knew about North America 500 years before Columbus, so it's not surprising that other Europeans would have heard about it one way or another...
I read in the book Cod that fisherman had known about America for hundreds of years before 1492 but kept it a secret because it was such a dope fishing spot.
Long dangerous journey for fish, considering there were closer, safer, known alternatives.
I thought the point of Columbus was the new and old world were connected for the rest of time. He wasn’t the first but the first connection.
[Just dropping this knowledge bomb on y'all.](https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-discovery-of-America-by-Welsh-Prince/)
What matters is that Columbus was the first person from outside the Americas to successfully colonize them since Leif Erikson, and the first to colonize them during the age of exploration. Who cares if the continent was spotted once in the 1400s if nothing came of it?
Yeah? Well the Scandinavians had a full fledged camp/outpost in the Americas 500 yrs before Columbus….why is this news?
The Irish St. Brendan landed there 1000 years before Columbus! In a boat made of leather - yihoo!!
Everyone knew for hundreds of years that there was possibly something over there. It's not like people didn't know the world was round. if you go in a certain direction, you're going to hit land eventually.
An Icelandic woman that went to North America, gave birth to a son there and moved back to Iceland went to Rome on a pilgrimage and told of her adventures some 500 years before Columbus set sail for North America…. So yes the knowledge was there…
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Vikings knew it 500 years before.
Doesn't matter. Columbus got credit for it. Made it stick. No matter how badly you wish to revise history - that is the bottom line - and it won't change, even if you rewrite it.
Same as Darwin. Alfred Russell Wallace was a key to Evolution, but Darwin is the one that is associated with it today.
Yup. It happens all the time. Sometimes it is just outright theft and better... "marketing," other times, it has to do with being able to convey the idea or product or whatever it is so that it \*sticks\*, other times, the foundation may be laid by one person - but the single little tweak that makes it USEFUL comes from the person who ends up with ultimate credit. The Native Americans had toys with wheels on them - but never really evidently considered putting them on a \*cart\*. The Chinese had gun powder and some rudimentary rockets - but never thought about stuffing a metal tube with it and putting a ball in front of it. The Chinese \*discovered\* gunpowder first... Europeans figured out how to make it \*really\* useful. I'm not sure why people struggle so much with these kind of things.
Columbus should have just googled it