Marklander hype

The Economist cites Paolo Chiesa in Terrae Incognitae, doi 10.1080/00822884.2021.1943792. The Dominican monk Galvano Fiamma's Cronica universalis, of the early 1340s, is now edited and published.

This passage is what is getting everyone all excited: 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. "Marckalada" sounds like "Markland" transcribed into proto-rinascita scholarly Latin.

In other words: it's a fish story; confusing the Seven Cities' memes rife in the southwestern Europe with a lot of lutefisk. It is less interesting for its own sake than the Viking mice in the Azores. What we do find, is that Milan - so, Genoa - had some lore about the Markland from the sagas. UPDATE 10/21: Occurs to me that the Inuit thought the Marklanders were jötnar too.

Although I still doubt that Columbus had access to this information. I doubt even more that Columbus cared. Columbus didn't take the northern route; he took the Lishbuna route. And in anycase Columbus never wrote about Markland; he thought he was bypassing whatever was up there, for a direct run to the Indies.

The good news, I suppose, is that the Cronica is real. Exactly because it is uninteresting. Contrast the Vinland.

As for the Cronica itself: what took so long? In the meantime we already had l'Anse aux Meadows, and the Norse sagas; so it is not like "The Norse Wuz Explorers An' Sheeit" was a Problematic in our generation. Chiesa is saying that not all the mediaeval MSS had yet made it into print as of the Napoleonic Wars, and that those Wars scattered the document in question. THAT interests me, that some mediaeval MSS in western Europe might still have evaded publication.