Viking tracks discovered in North America seem to have happened centuries before Christopher Columbus set sail. In other words, it has been revealed that the Vikings reached the new world long before Columbus discovered America. Based on a translation of a 14th-century text, this conclusion raises the possibility that Viking settlements in Vinland had a previously unrecognized influence on subsequent events.
Around 1345, Galvaneus Flamma, a Milanese priest, wrote a document called the Cronica universalis. While the original of this document has been lost, a copy made 50 years later was discovered in 2013. Professor Paolo Chiesa, a specialist in medieval Latin at the University of Milan, provided a translation of the text. In the journal Terrae Incognitae, Chiesa reports that part of the text refers to Markalada in western Greenland.
The four Icelandic epics in the document contain narratives of Markland, which is thought to be modern Newfoundland or Labrador. Flamma attributes this information to Genoese sailors, and Chiesa sees it as proof that knowledge of Viking voyages reached Italy 150 years before Columbus arrived in America.
“It has long been recognized that the portolan (nautical) maps drawn in Genoa and Catalonia offer a more advanced geographical representation of the north, which can be obtained through direct contact with these regions,” says Chiesa. We are in the presence of the first reference to the American continent.”
Flamma was a historian and had the ambitious goal of writing the history of the entire world (“all creation”) in the Cronica universalis. Unsurprisingly, he never finished this work. But Flamma shows an impressive familiarity with the knowledge acquired by the Vikings. By describing Greenland as a barren place inhabited by white bears, he states that Erik the Red sees beyond its name. Although Flamma claims that Markalada is inhabited by giants, she describes the area as “rich in trees” and Chiesa notes that it is “not unlike the wooded Markland of the Greenland Epic”.
Chiesa sees Flamma as a reliable writer, citing her written sources while admitting that she often relied on oral accounts but used written verification whenever she could. Flamma attributed stories of Markland and other northern areas to sailors without being specific, but the closest port was Genoa.
Claims that Basque fishermen or Malian sailors reached America before Columbus have been made before, but these have often been refuted. The information seen in Flamma’s work is thought to have been carried by sailors to Genoa or other Italian cities. “The Genoans may have brought to their cities scattered news about this land, some real and some imaginary, which they heard in the northern ports,” Chiesa says. So he thinks that the news of Vikings reaching America spread from Genoa.
Chiesa does not speculate as to whether Columbus heard the same stories as Flamma. But the fact that he had heard these stories may explain his extraordinary confidence in the ability of his small ships to reach land, and his persuasion of the Spanish court, even though he greatly underestimated the size of the Earth and the eastward stretch of Asia.
It is generally accepted that Columbus did not “discover” America because of the presence of humans who have been there for at least 21,000 years. However, if Chiesa is right, the news Columb brings back may not even be entirely new to Southern Europe.
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