11 Sep 22
@shallow-blue saidToscanelli (and all other educated people of the time) believed that Asia was far larger than it is which made up the extra distance.
No, they didn't. They knew the Earth is larger than Columbus thought it was. That's why he had such problems getting financed. Only the inbred Spanish royals, big on money and little on knowledge, took him up on it. If America hadn't been in his way between Spain and the true Indies, there would have been a country's worth of eggs on all of their faces.
@shallow-blue saidColumbus had problems getting financed because Portugal already had a route to India and Spain was finishing up the Reconquista. Nothing to do with the maps.
No, they didn't. They knew the Earth is larger than Columbus thought it was. That's why he had such problems getting financed. Only the inbred Spanish royals, big on money and little on knowledge, took him up on it. If America hadn't been in his way between Spain and the true Indies, there would have been a country's worth of eggs on all of their faces.
11 Sep 22
http://www.myoldmaps.com/late-medieval-maps-1300/252-paolo-toscanellis-chart/252-toscanelli.pdf
In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle had said: “The regions round the Pillars of Hercules are in connection with the regions round India, and between them there is nothing but sea.” Strabo (first century A.D.) believed that by sailing with an easterly wind in the Western Ocean one “could reach the Indies”. About 120 A.D the Roman philosopher Favorinus wrote that the same ocean which the Greeks knew as the Atlantic Sea was known in East Asia as the Great Sea. Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus put forward similar views in the 13th century. In the 1470’s, Paolo Toscanelli (1397-1482), the Florentine physician and cosmographer, was the earliest known medieval supporter of a westward voyage from Europe to the Far East to portray his theories cartographically. He contended that the Far East could be reached more directly by sailing west than by rounding the Cape of Good Hope and crossing the Indian Ocean. Toscanelli accepted Marco Polo’s earliest claim of the elongated Asian continent.