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Marco Polo sailed from Southern China to Southern Iran between 1292 and 1294, crossing the Malacca Strait, even had to stay half year in Sumatra because of monsoon season.
There have been questions raised regarding Marco Polo with a group of historians and archeologist who have come to believe that he never made it to Asia and simply repeated stories that he had heard from various traders who did.
I find it really interesting that more than half of the world was unknown until JUST 600 years ago.
Almost unbelievable that we all thought that Africa was just Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania before the Early-1400's.
That we found the Americas so late i can understand but Sub-Saharan Africa come on now, was it that hard to just follow the coast
There was probably a lot more going out to explore than there was coming back to report. Most of the interest was in going to places that they knew existed. Prester John's legendary kingdom was sort of a moving target that turned out to be Ethiopia. China/Cathay, India, Persia, the Silk Road kept people busy. The Portuguese were out there but for how long? If they found anything they just kept it to themselves. The Vikings were all over the place and the settlements in Greenland had occasional visitors from Europe. They were in North America briefly and might have had seasonal camps for taking wood or other resources back to Greenland. There is some evidence of a European presence on Baffin island earlier than the usual dates of the Greenland settlements so somebody was getting out there but maybe not getting back home.
The Carthaginians ventured out into the Atlantic. Himilco the Navigator (5th century BC) sailed along the western coast of Europe and got to northern France and maybe England. Hanno sailed from Carthage along the coast of Africa and probably out to the Canary Islands. They seemed to know about what we call the Sargasso Sea.
I know that the phoenicians explored africa quite extensively and is possible that they circumnavigated the continent under the commision of pharaoh Necho II. So was any of this information passed down onto the europeans? Also there was a lot of trade (salt, gold, ivory, slaves etc.) going through the sahara desert, which is why timbuktu was so successful. So shouldn't the europeans been aware that there was fertile lands with prosperous civilizations beyond the sahara?
Would western Europeans have actually known about places like Malasia and SE Asia? Didn't they have only the vaguest ideas, bordering on rumor or fantasy, about most of Asia east o Levant?
By doing some research i made this simplified map about how Western Europeans thought the World looked like before the 1400's.
Am i right or should the area be larger or smaller?
This is a map created in 1450, which was before they discovered America. From the drawing it seems like they knew about
- Europe
- Africa, but some details are quite wrong
- Asia with Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Japan. But the map is very inaccurate.
I would assume they knew about the same region pre-1400, but in less detail.
By doing some research i made this simplified map about how Western Europeans thought the World looked like before the 1400's.
Am i right or should the area be larger or smaller?
Nice map! But I think you may want to include the Eastern US in your map. A Viking settlement on the Hudson river has just been discovered. And there were Vikings in Canada as well. And all of that happened before 1000 AD.
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