https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2021/09/25/a-monk-in-14th-century-italy-wrote-about-the-americas

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[                    ]
The AmericasSep 25th 2021 edition

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

That was long before Christopher Columbus set sail

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Sep 25th 2021

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THAT VIKINGS crossed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus is
well established. Their sagas told of expeditions to the coast of
today's Canada: to Helluland, which scholars have identified as
Baffin Island or Labrador; Markland (Labrador or Newfoundland) and
Vinland (Newfoundland or a territory farther south). In 1960 the
remains of Norse buildings were found on Newfoundland.

But there was no evidence to prove that anyone outside northern
Europe had heard of America until Columbus's voyage in 1492. Until
now. A paper for the academic journal Terrae Incognitae by Paolo
Chiesa, a professor of Medieval Latin Literature at Milan University,
reveals that an Italian monk referred to the continent in a book he
wrote in the early 14th century. Setting aside the scholarly reserve
that otherwise characterises his monograph, Mr Chiesa describes the
mention of Markland (Latinised to Marckalada) as "astonishing".

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

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

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

His thesis raises a new question: why does the eastern seaboard of
America not feature on any known Genoese map of the period? But it
could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off
across what most contemporaries considered a landless void.#

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print
edition under the headline "Medieval mapping"

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