The Cronica universalis, written by the Milanese friar Galvaneus Flamma or de la Flamma (in Italian, Galvano Fiamma, 1283 – c. 1345), contains an astonishing reference to a land named Marckalada (terra que dicitur Marckalada), situated west of Greenland. This land is recognizable as the Markland mentioned by some Icelandic sources, and identified by most scholars as some part of Atlantic coast of North America. Galvaneus’s reference is the first mention of the American continent in the Mediterranean region and gives evidence of early circulation, outside the Nordic area, of information about lands west of Greenland.

Galvaneus was a Dominican friar who lived in Milan and was connected to the Visconti family, which held at the time the lordship of the city.¹1 On Galvaneus’s biography and literary works, see Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi, vol. 2 (Roma: ad S. Sabinae, 1975), pp. 6–10; Jörg Busch, Die mailänder Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Arnulf und Galvaneus Flamma. Die Beschäftigung mit der Vergangenheit im Umfeld einer oberitalienischen Kommune vom späten 11. bis zum frühen 14. Jahrhundert (München: Fink, 1997); Paolo Tomea, “Fiamma, Galvano,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 47 (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997), pp. 331–8; Tomea, “Per Galvano Fiamma,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 39 (1996), pp. 77–120; Vera Fravventura, “Galvanus Flamma,” in CALMA. Compendium Auctorum Latinorum Medii Aevi (500–1500), IV.1 (Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2012), pp. 42–5; Riccardo Macchioro, “La Chronica Danielis nelle opere di Galvano Fiamma e nel Manipulus florum,” in Miscellanea Graecolatina II, eds. Lisa Benedetti and Federico Gallo (Milano and Roma: Biblioteca Ambrosiana and Bulzoni, 2014), pp. 133–82; Paolo Chiesa, “Galvano Fiamma fra storiografia e letteratura,” in Courts and Courtly Cultures in Early Modern Europe. Models and Languages, eds. Simone Albonico and Serena Romano (Roma: Viella, 2016), pp. 77–92; and Galvano Fiamma, Chronica pontificum Mediolanensium, ed. Federica Favero (Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2018), pp. 3–16.View all notes He wrote several literary works in Latin, mainly on historical subjects. His testimony is valuable for information on Milanese contemporary facts, about which he has first-hand knowledge. When Galvaneus deals with the past or with non-Milanese contexts, however, he gathers information from different sources, which he scrupulously declares, but which he assembles without critical judgment.²2 For a recent survey on Galvaneus as historian, see Marino Zabbia, “La specificità del lavoro di storico secondo Galvano Fiamma,” in In presenza dell’autore. L’autorappresentazione come evoluzione della storiografia professionale tra basso Medioevo e Umanesimo, ed. Fulvio Delle Donne (Napoli: Federico II University Press, 2018), pp. 55–78; Federica Favero, “Ripensamenti e modifiche nelle cronache di Galvano Fiamma,” in Scrivere storia nel medioevo. Regolamentazione delle forme e delle pratiche nei secoli XII–XV, eds. Fulvio Delle Donne, Paolo Garbini and Marino Zabbia (Roma: Viella, 2021), pp. 45–61. See also Sharon Dale, “Fourteenth-Century Lombard Chronicles,” in Chronicling History. Chroniclers and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, eds. Sharon Dale, Alison Williams Lewin and Duane J. Osheim (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), pp. 171–96, focused on Galvaneus’s attitude toward the Visconti family and contemporary events.View all notes The Cronica universalis is thought to be one of his later works, perhaps the last one, and was left unfinished and unperfected; the approximate date is 1339–1345. The original plan, set out in the prologue, envisaged including the history of the whole world from the Creation to Galvaneus’s times, in 15 books. The actual work is significantly shorter than previously announced: the narrative stops in the middle of the fourth book, ending with the biblical king Joas (2 Kings, ch. 11 & 12). There is no evidence that any further sections were ever written.³3 For a description of Galvaneus’s Cronica universalis see Paolo Chiesa, “Ystorie Biblie omnium sunt cronicarum fundamenta fortissima. La Cronica universalis di Galvano Fiamma (ms. New York, collezione privata),” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medioevo 118 (2016), pp. 179–216.View all notes

In 2013, Sante Ambrogio Céngarle Parisi first identified Galvaneus’s Cronica universalis and drew attention to it.⁴4 Sante Ambrogio Céngarle Parisi, “Introduzione,” in La Cronaca estravagante di Galvano Fiamma, eds. Sante Ambrogio Céngarle Parisi and Massimiliano David (Milano: Casa del Manzoni, 2013), pp. 1–196: 43–5. Céngarle Parisi named the work Cronaca Bianchiniana, from a previous reader of the manuscript (the Milanese notary and scholar Giovanni Battista Bianchini, 1613–1699); however, the name Galvaneus gave to his own work, as indicated in the prologue, is Cronica generalis sive universalis.View all notes The work, written in Latin, is still unpublished; an edition is planned, in the context of a scholarly and educational program promoted by the University of Milan.⁵5 A number of master’s degree students (Roberta Ajello, Vittorio Fiore, Stefano Frati, Pamela Giunta, Giulia Greco, Giulia Negri, Myriam Nicoli, Rebecca Platini, Valentina Vavalà, Tommaso Zonca) have been involved in this program up to this point, with the tasks of transcribing the text from the manuscript and providing a first survey on its sources. This phase of the work is now finished; Dr. Federica Favero is attending to standardizing the transcriptions and checking the sources, in order to produce a critical edition of the Cronica.View all notes It is preserved in a single manuscript held by a private owner, who kindly gave permission to photograph it.⁶6 On the story of the manuscript, see Céngarle Parisi, “Introduzione,” pp. 71–2, 131–8; Céngarle Parisi, “Gli estratti in due codici milanesi della Cronaca Bianchiniana di Galvano Fiamma,” in Miscellanea Graecolatina III, eds. Stefano Costa and Federico Gallo (Milano and Roma: Biblioteca Ambrosiana and Bulzoni, 2015), pp. 267–86.View all notes The manuscript was written in Milan at the very end of the fourteenth century by a copyist named Pietro Ghioldi (in Latin, Petrus de Guioldis), who was also responsible for transcribing other historical works of Galvaneus.⁷7 On this copyist, see Mirella Ferrari, “La biblioteca del monastero di S. Ambrogio: episodi per una storia,” in Il monastero di S. Ambrogio nel medioevo (Milano: Vita e pensiero, 1989), pp. 82–162: 120; Céngarle Parisi, “Introduzione,” pp. 90–122; and Chiesa, “Galvano Fiamma,” pp. 83–7.View all notes He apparently planned a complete edition of Flamma’s chronicles in several copies. The manuscripts of Galvaneus’s works provided by Ghioldi are often defective, not so much because of his inadequacy as a copyist, but rather because he had to deal with inconsistent models: there is evidence that he used some incomplete and unfinished manuscripts by Galvaneus, which were sometimes difficult to read, enriched by marginal notes and slips.⁸8 On the state of composition of the Cronica universalis see Chiesa, “Ystorie Biblie,” pp. 190–1. The existence of glosses, probably marginal, in Galvaneus’s manuscripts available to Ghioldi, is testified by the copyist himself. While copying another work of Galvaneus (the so-called Cronicon maius), he declares that his model presents some glosses, and that he is going to warn the reader whenever he transcribes one of them (a modo in antea cum fuerit introserta aliqua glosa in corpore, ponam in principio istud verbum: “glosa”, ut possit secerni testus a glosa, “From here on, when some gloss is inserted in the text, I will write the label glosa at the beginning, so that the addition can be distinguished from the actual text:” Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS A.275.inf, fol. 62 v). Evidence of slips in Ghioldi’s model is the table of the terrestrial parallels and the winds drawn on fol. 262 of the Cronica universalis, placed in an incongruous position (see note 65 and context). For the incompleteness of the work, see also Paolo Chiesa, “Summa cronicarum. Un’opera incompiuta e perduta di Galvano Fiamma,” Filologia mediolatina 24 (2017), pp. 305–21.View all notes In this situation, Ghioldi made many mistakes in transcribing uncommon words (e.g. personal and geographical names), and left open several problems in the general structure of the work (duplications of sentences, lack of chapter numbers, incongruous internal cross-references, etc.); however, he was a professional copyist; hence, quite correct where Latin wording was more easily understandable, or when the antigraph was unambiguously readable. As a matter of fact, Ghioldi’s attitude toward the text seems remarkably conservative and testifies in favor of his substantial fidelity to the models.

The mention of Marckalada occurs in the third book, which includes the third age of humankind (from Abraham to David), according to the traditional Augustinian partition. The narrative is structured on the grid of Biblical chronology, which Galvaneus complements with secular history and mythology. In addition to the chronological account, in the third book the writer inserts a long geographical excursus, mainly dealing with exotic areas: the Far East, Arctic lands, Oceanic islands, Africa.⁹9 The inclusion of geographical sections within historical treatises is a common feature in medieval encyclopedic works. The connection is often provided by an event which opens a window on the dissemination of peoples in the world. In the case of Galvaneus’s Cronica universalis, the digression is prompted by the diaspora of the Trojan princes after the defeat of their city, which allows the author to describe various lands and their alleged history.View all notes His sources are both scholarly treatises, such as Isidorus and Solinus, and recent accounts of travelers, such as Marco Polo and Odoric of Pordenone.¹⁰10 Marco Polo’s travel report was already widely disseminated at the time. On its circulation inside the Dominican Order, see the essays collected in Ad consolationem legentium. Il Marco Polo dei Domenicani, eds. Maria Conte, Antonio Montefusco and Samuela Simion (Venezia: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2020). For Odorico’s Relatio, written in 1330, which was later widely circulated, Galvaneus provides one of the earliest testimonies.View all notes Sometimes he quotes uncommon works, such as the Epistole of the Franciscan John (it. Giovanni) of Montecorvino, missionary to China,¹¹11 On the occurrences of this author in the Cronica universalis, see Giulia Greco, “Viaggiatori mendicanti nelle opere di Galvano Fiamma,” Franciscana 22 (2020), pp. 225–56: 237–47.View all notes and the Tractatus de mappa by the Genoese priest and cartographer John (it. Giovanni) of Carignano, a treatise that partially survives only thanks to Galvaneus’s extracts.¹²12 On this work see note 62 and context.View all notes The writer is also aware of the medieval scientific notions about climate zones and is interested in theoretical discussions about the habitability of non-temperate lands; he considers both southern (sub equinoctiali) and northern lands (sub pollo [i.e. polo] artico), in order to demonstrate that people live there as well.¹³13 On the medieval discussion on this topic, see Nathalie Bouloux, “L’espace habité,” in La terre. Connaissance, représentations, mesure au Moyen Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 259–441. Galvaneus devotes some chapters to it (3.273–277), quoting many auctoritates (e.g. Macrobius, Adelard of Bath, Avicenna, Solinus, the Imago mundi, etc.). He seems however to be mainly indebted to the Italian philosopher and physician Peter of Abano († c. 1315), who in chapter 67 of his Conciliator differentiarum, discusses the problem with similar arguments and relying on similar auctoritates: Petro Abano Patavino, Conciliator controversiarum, quae inter philosophos et medicos versantur (Venetiis: apud Iuntas, 1548). Galvaneus does not actually mention the name of Peter, but this can be explained with the fact that he was condemned by the Inquisition.View all notes In this context, he mentions Marckalada. Here is the text, with an English translation; I preserve some underlining of sources, visible in the manuscript. In italics are the most relevant passages, which we are going to discuss.¹⁴14 Cronica universalis 3.275 (fols. 258va–259va). I report literally the text as copied by Ghioldi, without standardizing non-classic (or, frankly, irregular) spelling, but adding an interpretative punctuation. I am indebted to Giulia Greco for the preliminary transcription of this passage. Our translation is basically literal, but it tries to explain some logically implied steps.View all notes

The first argument concerns lands where people live, despite the supposed high temperature. On this point, Galvaneus derives his information from those whom he generically calls auctores that is, the geographical tradition passed to the Middle Ages from Late Antiquity, represented by Solinus and Isidorus, and more recently Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Albertus Magnus, Bentius (it. Benzo or Benzone) of Alessandria,¹⁶16 Among the many medieval writers who dealt with such subjects, we mention those who were certainly known by Galvaneus, who quotes them explicitly in his works. Bartholomaeus Anglicus († c. 1250) is the author of the De proprietatibus rerum, the most widespread encyclopedia of the thirteenth century; see Heinz Meyer, Die Enzyklopädie des Bartholomäus Anglicus. Untersuchungen zur Überlieferungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte von De proprietatibus rerum (München: Fink, 2000). Since this work lacks a modern edition, I refer to the editio Argentinensis of 1505: Liber de proprietatibus rerum Bartholomei Anglici Ordinis Minorum, https://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0001/bsb00018287/images/. Albertus Magnus († 1280) is the famous Dominican philosopher and naturalist, widely read in the studia generalia and within the Order. Bentius of Alessandria († c. 1337) is a northern Italian writer who composed a huge encyclopedia (Chronicon), preserved in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS B 24 Inf. and published only in part, which was largely exploited by Galvaneus; see Marco Petoletti, Il Chronicon di Benzo d’Alessandria e i classici latini all’inizio del XIV secolo (Milano: Vita e pensiero, 2000).View all notes and others. For what concerns the northern lands, the major authority is Marco Polo, who is explicitly quoted, especially his description of the regions north of Karakorum, the royal city of the Mongols. We report the corresponding passage in the Latin translation (before 1320) of the Dominican friar Pipinus of Bologna: this very widespread version seems likely to have been the direct source of Galvaneus, who was a Dominican as well.¹⁷17 Liber domini Marchi Pauli de Veneciis de conditionibus et consuetudinibus orientalium regionum I 62. I take the text from the electronic edition of Samuela Simion, available at http://virgo.unive.it/ecf-workflow/books/Ramusio/altre_schede/P_I_62.html (based on Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 983). I have verified and slightly corrected Simion’s text on Paris, BnF, lat. 6244–A, fol. 40 r–v.View all notes

Nevertheless, a part of Galvaneus’s narrative (the part we have highlighted in italics quoting the Cronica universalis) does not depend on Marco Polo. Our writer states that “sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway” (marinarii qui conversantur in mari Datie et Norvegye) provide information about some lands of the far north: Yslandia, which is said to lie ultra Norvegiam versus tramontanam; then Grolandia, whose geographical position can be deduced by the adverb inde (namely “beyond Yslandia in the same direction”) and which is described as the extreme north, where the Polar Star is left behind. We can suppose that marinarii are also the source of the last passage, devoted to Marckalada, which is said to lie west of Grolandia. Unlike the information about Yslandia and Grolandia, the news about Marckalada are admittedly vague: there is hearsay, but nothing “for sure” (nec umquam fuit aliquis marinarius qui de ista terra nec de eius condictionibus aliquid scire potuerit pro certo; “no sailor was ever able to know anything for sure about this land or about its features”).

The lands called Yslandia and Grolandia do not pose problems of identification, since they are easily recognizable as Iceland and Greenland. Concerning the terra que dicitur Marckalada—not specifically defined insula, as Galvaneus does for Greenland—,¹⁸18 On both occasions when Galvaneus deals with Greenland, he qualifies this land as insula, a notion that was not taken for granted at the time. Adam of Bremen speaks of Greenland as an island; in The King’s Mirror the question of whether such land is mainland or an island is treated as controversial, and ultimately Greenland is considered mainland: Speculum regale – Konungs Skuggsjá, transl. Laurence Marcellus Larson (New York: The American Scandinavian Foundation, 1917), pp. 142–3. For a discussion and bibliography about the medieval opinions on Greenland’s status, see Kirsten A. Seaver, The Frozen Echo. Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000–1500 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 34–5.View all notes no other land seems to be taken in account, except the Markland mentioned in a scant number of medieval sources, all emanating from Iceland¹⁹19 Summary in Rudolf Simek, Altnordische Kosmographie. Studien und Quellen zu Weltbild und Weltbeschreibung in Norwegen und Island vom 12. bis 14. Jahrhundert, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 4 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1990), p. 207.View all notes and all indeed placing it to the south-west of Greenland. Most of the slight differences in spelling between Galvaneus’s Marckalada and the Icelandic Markland do not represent a problem²⁰20 The dropping of the nasal -n- might have been caused by the deletion of the titulus on the third -a-. The final vowel -a- was probably added to match a standard Italian onomastic form (likewise, an -a- was added at the end of the word in Grolandia).View all notes; it is impossible to know if such differences derive from Galvaneus’s sources, or if they should be ascribed to Galvaneus himself or to the copyist of the manuscript. As we said, Ghioldi often miswrote personal and geographical names he was unfamiliar with, but slavishly transcribed his models where the wording was plain. Apparently, this is the case: the copyist might have miswritten the name of the land, but there is no reason to think that he modified the rest of the sentence, a behavior which would be unusual for him. The only element of the spelling that strikes us as odd is the grapheme -ck-, extremely rare in Italian manuscripts of the fourteenth century and unique in the whole Cronica universalis. The use of -ck- implies an anomalous pronunciation (strengthened or stressed) of the guttural sound; this uncommon and isolated trait is unlikely to be a creation of Galvaneus or Ghioldi, and its singularity generates the suspicion that it depends on the persistence of a previous source.

All the medieval Nordic sources that mention Markland are well known to scholars; however, we shall briefly summarize them.

1. In the Eiríks saga rauða (Eirik the Red’s Saga), Markland is mentioned twice. 1) The hero Thorfinn Karlsefni and his people, coming from Helluland, “sailed for two days before a northerly wind²¹21 Var. of ms. H: “they sailed for two days, first south and then shifting course to south-east.”View all notes and sighted land ahead; this was a heavily wooded country abounding with animals. There was an island to the south-east, where they found bears, and so they named it Bjarn Isle; they named the wooded mainland itself Markland.”²²22 Eiríks saga rauða 8. Icelandic text: Eiríks saga rauða. Eyrbyggja saga. Grœnlendinga saga, eds. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson, Íslenzk fornrit 4 (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1957). I take the translation from The Vinland Sagas. The Norse Discovery of America, eds. Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 94. From these editions are also taken the subsequent quotations of the Grœnlendinga saga.View all notes 2) Coming back from Vinland, Thorfinn Karlsefni and his people “set sail before a southerly wind and reached Markland, when they came upon five skrælings—a bearded man, two women, and two children. Karlsefni and his men captured the two boys, but the others got away and sank down into the ground. They took the boys with them, taught them their own language, and baptized them. The boys said that their mother was called Vætild and their father Ovægir. The boys said that the land of the skrælings was ruled by two kings, one of whom was called Avaldamon and the other Valdidida. They said that there were no houses there and that people lived in caves or holes in the ground.”²³23 Eiríks saga rauða 12; transl. from The Vinland Sagas, pp. 102–3.View all notes The text is preserved in the Hauksbók (AM 544 4^to),²⁴24 The AM abbreviation means, as usual, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling, housing the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection at the University of Copenhagen.View all notes written in 1306–1308,²⁵25 Rudolf Simek and Hermann Pálsson, Lexikon der altnordischen Literatur (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1987), pp. 151–2. Björn Jónsson of Skarðsá, who wrote in the seventeenth century an historical work about Greenland, speaks about “wood and other drift that comes [to Greenland] from the bays of Markland” (trans. by Fridtjof Nansen, In Northern Mists. Arctic Exploration in Early Times, London: Heinemann, 1911, vol. 1 p. 299). It is not clear if Jónsson had access to an independent source, or if he himself deduced the information from sagas’s context (he is known to have used Hauksbók as a source in 1625).View all notes and in the Skálholtsbók (AM 557 4^to), written about 1420.²⁶26 Simek and Pálsson, Lexikon der altnordischen Literatur, p. 71.View all notes The more recent manuscript is somewhat more conservative than the older one; the original text is thought to go back to the thirteenth century, although the narrative matter refers to the end of the tenth century.

2. In the Grœnlendinga Saga (Saga of Greenlanders), the hero Leif Eiriksson and his people, coming from Helluland, reached a country which is described as “flat and wooded land, with white sandy beaches wherever they went; and the land sloped gently down to the sea.” Leif said: “This country shall be named after its natural resources: it shall be called Markland.”²⁷27 Grœnlendinga Saga 3. Icelandic text: see note 22; transl. from The Vinland Sagas, p. 55. The name Markland is supposed to be connected with Icelandic mörk, “forest;” see Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), p. 414. Cleasby and Vigfússon also connect the name with the Icelandic verb marka, “to sign”, “to mark” (a property line), meaning: “forest-land with the notion of ‘march-land’, ‘border-land’” (p. 413).View all notes The oldest manuscript is the Flateyjarbók (Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, GKS 1005 fol.), completed in 1387²⁸28 Simek and Pálsson, Lexikon der altnordischen Literatur, pp. 85–6.View all notes; the original text is also thought to go back to the thirteenth century and the narrative matter to the end of the tenth century.

3. The Skálholtsannáll (Annals of Iceland; ms. AM 420 A 4^to, written in 1356 or later) for the year 1347 reports this reference: “A craft came from Greenland which was smaller in size than small vessels that trade to Iceland. It came into the entrance of Straumfjörd [on the south side of Snæfellsnes, Iceland]. It had no anchor. There were seventeen men on board who had been on a voyage to Markland and later had been driven by gales to this land.”²⁹29 Islandske annaler indtil 1578, ed. Gustav Storm (Christiania: Grøndahl, 1888), p. 213. The translation is by Geoffrey J. Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1980), pp. 77–8, who discusses the passage by quoting Edward Reman, Norse Discoveries and Explorations of America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1949), p. 179. Seaver, The Frozen Echo, p. 28, considers this fact as evidence that in the fourteenth century the Greenlander Norse resumed Markland voyages for obtaining lumber.View all notes This information is recalled, with small changes, in the later Gottskálksannáll and Flateyjarannáll.³⁰30 Islandske annaler indtil 1578, pp. 353, 403.View all notes

4. Markland is also mentioned in the description of the world (Heimslýsing; conventionally named Kurze Weltbeschreibung by Rudolf Simek) reported in the manuscript AM 736 II 4^to (written about 1300) and in some later witnesses.³¹31 Simek, Altnordische Kosmographie, pp. 155–60, 428–32.View all notes The same description is also premised to the account of the journey (Leiðarvísir) by Nikulás Bergsson from Munkaþverá (oldest manuscript: AM 194 8^vo, late fourteenth century).³²32 Simek, Altnordische Kosmographie, pp. 264–73.View all notes This text says: “South from Greenland is Helluland, then Markland. Not far from there is Vinland; some people suppose that this land is an offshoot of Africa.”³³33 Simek, Altnordische Kosmographie, p. 435.View all notes At the end of the passage, the version of the Leiðarvísir comments: “if this be so, then the outer ocean [i.e. the ocean surrounding the disk of the earth] must fall in between Vinland and Markland”—a sentence which is not found in the oldest manuscript of the Kurze Weltbeschreibung. Other Nordic descriptions of the world, derived from the Kurze Weltbeschreibung, also contain similar information.³⁴34 Simek, Altnordische Kosmographie, pp. 444, 477.View all notes These mentions of “American” lands in Icelandic cosmographic treatises are thought to derive from the saga narratives: the adventure-genre is reduced into the fold of scientific literature.³⁵35 Simek, Altnordische Kosmographie, p. 325.View all notes

All these scant sources are Icelandic; no mention of the name Markland has ever been reported outside of the Nordic area. Scholars agree in identifying Markland, as with Vinland and Helluland, as some part of the Atlantic coast of North America, where Icelanders and Greenlanders made explorations and marginal settlements, as is demonstrated by archeological evidence. Markland is usually assumed to be Labrador or Newfoundland, Helluland Baffin Island or Labrador, Vinland Newfoundland or some southern seaside.³⁶36 The identification of these lands was intensely discussed in the past; see e.g. Väinö Tanner, De gamla nordbornas Helluland, Markland och Vinland. Ett försök att lokalisera Vinlands-resornas huvudetapper i de islandska sagorna (Åbo, 1940). For a survey of the different views, see Raleigh A. Skelton, “The Vinland Map,” in The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 107–239: 218–20. More recently, see: Rudolf Simek, Erde und Kosmos im Mittelalter. Das Welt vor Kolumbus (München: Beck, 1992), p. 65; Kirsten A. Seaver, Maps, Myths, and Men (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 36–8. As Skelton remarks, the attempts to elucidate the geography of the sagas are basically speculative; although archeological evidence allows to identify some settlements, it is not possible to associate them to a definite name. See also Seaver, The Frozen Echo, pp. 26–7.View all notes This is obviously a matter for specialists, and we do not dare to enter the field.

The mention of Marckalada/Markland by Fiamma is a new testimony on this region, which is added to the few so far known. What makes the passage exceptional is its geographical provenance: not the Nordic area, as in the case of the other mentions, but northern Italy. We are in the presence of the first reference to the American continent, albeit in an embryonic form, in the Mediterranean area.

The Marckalada described by Galvaneus is rich in trees (ibi sunt arbores virides), not unlike the wooded Markland of the Grœnlendinga Saga, and animals live there, as in the Markland of the Eiríks saga rauða. These details could be standard, as distinctive of any good land; but they are not trivial, because the common feature of northern regions is to be bleak and barren, as actually Greenland is in Galvaneus’s account, or as Iceland is described by Adam of Bremen.³⁷37 4:36: Magistri Adam Bremensis Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, ed. Bernhard Schmeidler, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum (Hannover and Leipzig: Hahn 1917), p. 272: Nulla ibi fruges, minima lignorum copia (“no crops grow there, very little wood”).View all notes However, other details are somewhat different from the image of Markland provided by the sagas. Galvaneus apparently contaminates traits which Nordic narratives connected to other lands, as is usual with hearsay. The “huge stones” (lapides saxei grandes) recall the description of Helluland in the Eiríks saga rauða and in the Grœnlendinga Saga: in this land Thorfinn Karlsefni “found many slabs of stones so huge that two men could stretch out on them sole to sole.”³⁸38 Eiríks saga rauða 8 (transl. The Vinland Sagas, p. 93); Grœnlendinga Saga 3: “Between glaciers and shore the land was like one great slab of rock” (transl. The Vinland Sagas, p. 55). Actually, the name Helluland means “land of stone slabs”; see Cleasby and Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, p. 255, s.v. hella.View all notes The giants who are said to inhabit Marckalada are common in Old Norse epic traditions, although they are usually reported to live north-eastward (and not westward); an exception is the Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, which sets giant people in Helluland.³⁹39 Bárðar saga 1; Icelandic text: Harðar saga. Bárðar saga, Þorskfirðinga saga, Flóamanna saga, eds. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Íslenzk fornrit 13 (Reykjavík: Hid Islenzka Fornritafélag, 1991), pp. 99–172; transl. Bárðar saga, eds. Jón Skaptason and Phillip Pulsiano (New York: Garland, 1984).View all notes

Besides the surprising reference to Markland, the knowledge that Galvaneus shows of Greenland is also remarkable. To this land, he devotes another passage,⁴⁰40 Cronica universalis 3.347–349 (fol. 274v).View all notes where the alternative spelling Gorlandia, Gronlandia occurs:

Insula dicta Gorlandia.

The island named Gorlandia.

This passage is included in a list of islands located north or west of Ireland. The obvious sources for the context are Solinus’s Collectanea and the medieval encyclopedists depending on Solinus (among Galvaneus’s readings, Isidore and Bartholomaeus Anglicus)⁴¹41 This second reference to Greenland is inserted between the chapters on Thanatos and Thyle, which follow each other in Solinus, Collectanea 22.8–9: C. Iulii Solini Collectanea rerum memorabilium, ed. Theodor Mommsen (2^th ed., Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), pp. 101–2, and Isidore, Etymologiae 14.6.3–4: Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), ad loc. In these chapters some verbal correspondences occur with the wording of Bartholomaeus (De proprietatibus rerum, 15.155 and 161), which introduces Thanatos and Thyle in a different order; this fact suggest that Fiamma was using simultaneously a multiplicity of sources, as he does elsewhere.View all notes; none of these authors, however, mentions Greenland or another island that can somehow correspond to it. Actually, knowledge of Greenland in south-central Europe seems to have been very limited in the fourteenth century. We have no evidence of a southern circulation of the literary sources that mentioned it, such as the chronicle of Adam of Bremen⁴²42 4.37 (ed. Schmeidler, p. 274): Sunt autem plures aliae in Oceano insulae, quarum non minima est Gronland, “there are other islands in the ocean, among which Greenland is not the smallest.”View all notes and the Konungs Skuggsjá (King’s Mirror), an Old Norse speculum of the thirteenth century focused on the north-Atlantic area.⁴³43 See note 18.View all notes Although the papal curia was aware of the existence of Greenland since the eleventh century,⁴⁴44 In 1053 Rome granted jurisdiction over Gronlant, along with the other septentrionales nationes, to the archbishops of Hamburg: Diplomatarium Norvegicum, vol. 17 (Kristiania: Malling, 1907), p. 772, no. 849.View all notes Galvaneus is the first to give some information about its features in the Italian area, and, more generally, in a Latin “scientific” and encyclopedic work, as his Cronica universalis claims to be.

Gathering together the information provided in both chapters, Grolandia/Gorlandia/Gronlandia is described as a land difficult to access and impossible to cultivate, populated by wild animals, whose inhabitants harvest food through hunting, fishing and poor husbandry, and lead a hard and miserable life in poverty and in constant fear. As in the reference to Marckalada, in the description of Greenland, a contamination between different narrative elements appears to occur. The domus subterranee are similar to those where the skrælings escape after encountering Thorfinn Karlsefni in Markland, according to the Eiríks saga rauða,⁴⁵45 Eiríks saga rauða 12 (transl. The Vinland Sagas, pp. 102–3).View all notes or to the subterranee spelunce where the Icelanders dwell, according to Adam of Bremen⁴⁶46 4:36 (ed. Schmeidler, p. 272).View all notes; the Eiríks saga rauða also reports that big white bears (ursi albi magni) live in an island close to Markland.⁴⁷47 Eiríks saga rauða 8 (transl. The Vinland Sagas, p. 93).View all notes The lack of wheat and wine and the foodstuffs of the dwellers (milk, meat and fish) find a partial parallel in Marco Polo’s narrative (carnibus vescuntur animalium … blado carent et vino: “they eat animal meat … they lack corn and wine”), as well as the information about the Polar Star’s startlingly visible southwards. The hint about the bishopric government of Greenland might echo what Adam of Bremen says of Iceland.⁴⁸48 4:36 (ed. Schmeidler, p. 272): episcopum suum habent pro rege (“they regard their bishop as king”).View all notes As a matter of fact, however, a Greenlander bishopric is attested since c. 1125: whatever its real authority,⁴⁹49 The actual strength of episcopal power in Greenland is controversial; see Seaver, The Frozen Echo, pp. 61–90.View all notes such office was probably the most recognizable and comparable form of jurisdiction for a foreigner.

From where does Galvaneus get his information about the north, so unusual for a scholar who, as far as is known, has never been out of northern Italy? A hypothesis can be formulated, taking into account the usual method of work of him, the sources that we know he had available, and the milieu in which he lived. Galvaneus is a writer who cares about indicating his sources. At the very beginning of the Cronica universalis (and of his other historiographical works), he provides a “bibliographic” list of the books that he exploited to assemble his treatise, also declaring the Milanese library where he consulted each of them. Moreover, he scrupulously indicates the source of every piece of information reported in the chronicle, quoting the name of each author within the text, and underlining it, so that there are pages of his works where we find dozens of “bibliographic” references. Puzzlingly, for the items concerning Marckalada and Greenland, Galvaneus only refers to some generic auctores (for the nonspecific discussion on habitability) and to Marco Polo, from whom, as we have already seen, he draws only partial and perfunctory information. For these passages, no other work fitting with similar contents is ever mentioned, neither in the text nor in the introductory “bibliographic” list. Galvaneus does not quote Adam’s Gesta archiepiscoporum and is unlikely to have known this work, which, as we said, did not circulate in southern Europe. He does not even quote here the De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, which he exploits elsewhere—the only encyclopedic source available to him which shows a partial (limited to Iceland) knowledge of north-western lands.⁵⁰50 Bartholomaeus Anglicus devotes a chapter to Iceland (15.174), including a description of the land, its resources and its inhabitants. Galvaneus mentions Iceland twice in the passages we have quoted, but in neither case gives any description of it. The different treatment of Iceland compared to Greenland and other islands is assumed to be one of the many irregularities and incompletenesses of the Cronica universalis, which, as we have said, is not finished.View all notes

Therefore, we are allowed to trust Galvaneus when he says that his knowledge comes from an oral report (dicunt): had he had some written source at his disposal, he would have most likely declared it (as he does customarily), in order to gain a stronger authority. Compatible with oral sources is also the conflation of elements drawn from various stories, legendary or real, belonging to previous traditions on different lands, blended together and reassigned to a specific place.⁵¹51 A conflation that could obviously predate Galvaneus, who is its final receiver and puts it in writing.View all notes Moreover, Galvaneus identifies his source as seafarers: marinarii qui conversantur in mari Datie et Norvegye, and I do not see any reason to disbelieve him. Alternative subjects, as Nordic pilgrims or clerics passing through Milan on their way to Rome, cannot obviously be excluded, but they correspond poorly to Galvaneus’s specificaton: he doesn’t speak of peregrini or even clerici, nor quotes ecclesiastical documents related to Iceland or Greenland,⁵²52 In any case, no ecclesiastical document known so far mentions Markland.View all notes although such qualifications or documents would have given greater force to the testimony. As a matter of fact, the details he reports are consistent with the interests and concerns of sailors: the position of the Polar Star, visible southwards⁵³53 About “the Polar Star which remains behind you,” Galvaneus seems to duplicate Marco Polo’s information in order to connect it to a specific land (Greenland, the most northerly country he is aware of).View all notes; the singular mention of white bears bringing shipwrecked sailors ashore⁵⁴54 Galvaneus’s wording (ursi … qui natant per mare et naufragos ad litus conducunt) does not make it clear whether the bears bring the castaways ashore to rescue or to eat them. In his description of Iceland (15.174), Bartholomaeus Anglicus describes white bears making holes in the ice, throwing themselves into the sea, a process that enabled them to bring ashore (ad litus deferentes) the fish they feed on.View all notes; the trade in birds of prey, very lucrative at the time⁵⁵55 On this trade, see Geoffry J. Marcus, “The Greenland Trade-Route,” The Economic History Review 7 (1954), pp. 71–80: 75; Seaver, The Frozen Echo, pp. 82–5; see also note 73 and context. Galvaneus likely interpolates from Marco Polo the detail that the falcones albi were sent to the emperor of Katai. The falcones albi were associated with northern lands also in the scientific literature of the Middle Ages. See Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, 13.11.65, ed. Hermann Stadler (Münster i.W.: Aschendorff, 1916–1920), vol. 2 p. 1465: falco albus qui venit a Septentrione et mari Oceano a regione Norwegiae et Suveciae et Estonia et finitimis silvis et montibus. “White hawk comes from the north and from the Ocean sea, from the regions of Norway, Sweden and Estonia and from the nearby forests and mountains.” In the Konungs Skuggsjá white falcons are mentioned as typical birds of Greenland (The King’s Mirror, p. 144: “they are more numerous there than in any other country; but the natives do not know how to make any use of them”).View all notes; the difficulty to reach the Greenlanders (fere ad ipsos nullus est accessus)⁵⁶56 Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic, p. 94, underlines that the voyage to Greenland was considered (and really was) the most dangerous sea-crossing in medieval Europe, and quotes (p. 98) a letter written in 1341 by the bishop of Bergen, testifying that the way to Greenland lay “across a very stormy and wide sea” (per mare non minus tempestuosissimum quam longissimum).View all notes; the storming waves which damage the ships⁵⁷57 According to the Konungs Skuggsjá, the Greenland Sea is supposed to be “more tempestuous than all other seas” (The King’s Mirror, p. 141), and it is reported to be ravaged by “sea hedges,” “as if all the waves and tempests of the ocean have been collected into three heaps, out of which three billows are formed … They are higher than lofty mountains and resemble steep, overhanging cliffs” (p. 137). With “sea hedges” Larson translates the Old Norse hafgerðingar (“portentous waves mentioned by old sailors in the main between Iceland and America,” according to Cleasby and Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, p. 228).View all notes and make them impossible to use for a later voyage—thus reducing the chances of their crew to make it back home.

In another case, Galvaneus explicitly states that he uses an oral source, whose name he is able to give. Although, as we said, his description of the Far East is based on written reports, in particular on those of Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone and John of Montecorvino,⁵⁸58 See above, notes 10–11.View all notes he also relates the information gathered from some frater Symon predicator qui in partibus illis moram contraxit annis V (“Friar Symon, a Dominican who spent five years in these regions”), otherwise unknown. Galvaneus states that frater Symon’s testimony is oral (dicit, narrat, habui ex ore)⁵⁹59 Cronica universalis 3.288–289, 3.333 (fols. 262va, 263rb, 270vb–271ra). On this Symon, see Greco, “Viaggiatori mendicanti,” pp. 247–54.View all notes; nevertheless, he deems it worthy of mention even in an erudite context such as the Cronica universalis—a remarkably original aspect of his treatise.

Where might Galvaneus have heard, directly or indirectly, about sailors’s experience? He lived in Milan, an inland city, not exactly a customary destination for seafarers. Our assumption is that he is reporting firsthand or secondhand information coming from Genoa, the closest seaport to Milan. As a matter of fact, in the Cronica universalis Galvaneus also shows familiarity with Genoa and Genoese sources in other cases:

1. As we said, Galvaneus literally quotes (3:373–377, fols. 277rb–278vb) a large section of the Tractatus de mappa, a work by a sacerdos Sancti Marchi de Ianua (“priest of St Mark of Genoa”), easily identified with the celebrated cartographer John of Carignano.⁶⁰60 John of Carignano was the priest of the Genoese church of San Marco in Molo, located in the harbor area, and was personally involved with seafaring activities; see Graziella Galliano, “Mauro, Giovanni (Giovanni da Carignano),” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 72 (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009), pp. 399–401.View all notes Except for the extracts of Galvaneus, this work is lost. Given the title and the content which Galvaneus reports, the Tractatus de mappa is supposed to be a complementary writing, that better explained a map—perhaps the same one for which John of Carignano is famous today—by adding more information.⁶¹61 John of Carignano’s chart was destroyed during the Second World War and is now observable only in mediocre photographic reproductions. The most accessible is preserved in the Archivio di Stato of Florence (Carte nautiche, geografiche e topografiche 2), available online (http://www.archiviodistato.firenze.it/). The pre-destruction bibliography, written by scholars who could see the original map, is still useful: Theobald Fischer, Sammlung mittelalterlicher Welt- und Seekarten italienischen Ursprungs und aus italienischen Bibliotheken und Archiven (Venezia: Ongania, 1886), pp. 117–26; K. Kretschmer, Die italienischen Portolane des Mittelalters (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1909), pp. 109–10. More recently: T. Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in The History of Cartography, I: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 371–463: 404–6; G. Ferro, La tradizione cartografica genovese e Cristoforo Colombo (Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1992), pp. 30–4.View all notes The passage quoted by Galvaneus has an exceptional historical importance, giving an account of the first “Ethiopian” embassy in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.⁶²62 See Paolo Chiesa, “Galvano Fiamma e Giovanni da Carignano. Una nuova fonte sull’ambasceria etiopica a Clemente V e sulla spedizione oceanica dei fratelli Vivaldi,” Itineraria 17 (2018), pp. 63–107; Alessandro Bausi and Paolo Chiesa, “The Hystoria Ethyopie in the Cronica universalis of Galvaneus de la Flamma (d. c. 1345),” Aethiopica 22 (2019), pp. 7–57.View all notes The Tractatus de mappa was a very rare work, and we have no evidence of its circulation outside Genoa.

2. At the end of the section on Ethiopia provided by John of Carignano (3:378, fols. 278vb–279ra), Galvaneus also adds a new testimony on the famous oceanic expedition of the Vivaldi brothers, who in 1291 sailed westward from Genoa and crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. According to Galvaneus’s account, the Vivaldi expedition was said to have reached Ethiopia, from where the survivors gave up returning to their city. It is not clear whether Galvaneus also derives this information from John of Carignano; however, he explicitly attests its Genoese origin, namely from the Ethiopian ambassadors passing through this city.⁶³63 Embaxiatores supradicti imperatoris Ethyopie qui fuerunt in Ianua, qui viderunt ipsos Ianuenses in Ethyopia, ista narraverunt (“The aforesaid ambassadors of the emperor of Ethiopia, who saw those Genoese in Ethiopia, told these stories of them”): Chiesa “Galvano Fiamma e Giovanni da Carignano,” p. 69; 100–7.View all notes

3. In a passage of the Cronica universalis (3:277, fols. 259vb–260ra), where he is describing the Indian region, Galvaneus refers to some “Genoese map:” In mappa Ianuensi[s] ponitur India; superius ponitur sepulcrum beati Thome apostoli, de quo supradictum est quod est ultra equinoctialem; iterum superius ponitur terra ubi fit zinziber; superius ponuntur multe insule; superius ponitur insula Tabropane (“In the Genoese map is drawn India; higher up is drawn the sepulchre of saint Thomas apostle, that we have already said is situated beyond the equator; higher up is drawn the land where ginger grows; higher up are drawn many islands; higher up is drawn the island of Tabropane”). Apparently, the mappa Ianuensis was a planisphere including the Asiatic continent, rich in cartouches (and perhaps pictures), one of which indicated India, another Thomas, another zinziber, another Tabropane.⁶⁴64 Chiesa “Galvano Fiamma e Giovanni da Carignano,” p. 79. We have no other trace of this map.View all notes The iterate adverb superius makes sense only in the progressive consulting of a map oriented with south at the top, where Tabropane is said to be drawn: Galvaneus describes the planisphere as if he had it in his own hands, following the succession of cartouches. Such a map was not a common object: the information on India contained in Galvaneus’s Mappa Ianuensis seems to be much more detailed than the only surviving planisphere attributable to a Genoese milieu, or derived from it, in the first half of the fourteenth century (the mappamundi by Peter Vesconte, included in the Liber secretorum of Marino Sanuto).

4. Inserted within the geographical section of the Cronica universalis (3:287, fol. 262 r) is a schematic representation of the terrestrial parallels, the cardinal points and the direction of the winds.⁶⁵65 The position of this table (on which I have a separate study planned) appears to be incongruous with the context, since in that point the general topic is sea chasms: in all probability, the scheme, originally drawn on a single leaf in the unorganized material left by Galvaneus, was inserted by the copyist Ghioldi in the wrong place.View all notes The table, based on astronomic coordinates (paralelus artarticus, tropicus yemalis, circulus equinoctialis, etc.), follows the Arabic tradition in considering the city of Harim (or Arin) as the geographical center of the world, and belongs to a kind of map popular at the time.⁶⁶66 Examples in David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in The History of Cartography, I, pp. 286–370: 354–5.View all notes Its peculiarity, however, is that the names of the winds are provided both in Latin (vulturnus, africus, favonius, etc.) and in vernacular (lebeg, suroch, mezdi, levanth, ponenth, grecho, magistro), with a peculiar interweaving of scholarly tradition and current experience. Writing the vernacular names of winds was usual in the portolans, a kind of map widespread at the time in maritime cities, and particularly in Genoa,⁶⁷67 On Genoese cartography, see Paolo Revelli, Cristoforo Colombo e la scuola cartografica genovese (Genova: Stabilimenti italiani arti grafiche, 1937); Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” pp. 404–7; Ferro, La tradizione cartografica genovese; Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes. La rapresentació medieval d’una mar solcada (Barcelona, 2007), pp. 248–63, 489–93.View all notes but largely unknown inland.

Therefore, there is evidence that Galvaneus draws some rare information from Genoa. Although we have no positive record of his stay in that city, it is very likely that he received his doctoral formation there, since the Dominican studium generale for northern Italy was located in Genoa between 1304 and 1320, a span of time within which Galvaneus supposedly studied.⁶⁸68 Tomea, “Per Galvano Fiamma,” p. 84 n. 25.View all notes He may have returned to the city later, or maintained relations with Genoese clergymen.⁶⁹69 We know nothing of Galvaneus’s life between 1315, when he is mentioned as a teacher in Milan, and 1330, when a document attests his presence in Bologna. In 1323 the Dominicans are supposed to have been forced to leave Milan, in obedience to the interdict issued by the papal legate Bertrand du Poujet against the city. Galvaneus could have moved to Genoa in this circumstance, or he may have visited the city during one of the Dominican capitula held in Genoa later in 1324, 1329, and 1333. See Chiesa, “Galvano Fiamma e Giovanni da Carignano,” p. 79.View all notes In every case, while he was writing the chronicle he had at his disposal texts and news coming from Genoa.

Given these parallels, our assumption is that information concerning the northern Atlantic came to Galvaneus from Genoa as well. The marinarii qui conversantur in mari Datie et Norvegye could be Genoese sailors themselves, or northern European sailors who transmitted news to their Genoese colleagues. Genoese were indeed the marinarii par excellence for the Milanese audience of the writer. An immediate derivation from Nordic seafarers seems less likely: we have no evidence of travels or contacts of Galvaneus in northern Europe, nor traces that he ever utilized written or oral sources of that direct provenance.

It has long been noticed that the fourteenth-century portolan charts drawn in Genoa and in Catalonia offer a more advanced geographical representation of the north,⁷⁰70 Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” p. 406, wonders about “the mechanism by which a steadily more plausible picture of the British Isles reached Mediterranean chartmakers.” Such remarks are not recent. Some decades before, Revelli, Cristoforo Colombo, p. 338, observed that John of Carignano was the author of “a first attempt of extraptolemaic figuration of northern Europe.” And in his classic work on Arctic exploration, Fridtjof Nansen remarked that many Nordic toponymies appear in the Carignano map “for the first time in any known authority,” and supposed that the Genoese priest “may have had the name of ports, etc., from sailors” (In Northern Mists, vol. 2, p. 21).View all notes which could be achieved through direct contacts with those regions, as is the case for the aforementioned chart by John of Carignano, and for those by Angelino Dulceti, who is considered to be the link between Genoese cartographic practice and Majorca.⁷¹71 Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes pp. 248–61 (with a discussion on the actual name of the cartographer, formerly reported as Delorto or Dulcert: p. 255). In Dulceti’s maps (dated Genoa, 1325, and Majorca, 1339), the girifalci and the ursi albi are associated with Norwegia.View all notes These notions about the north-west are likely to have come to Genoa through the shipping routes to the British Isles and to the continental coasts of the North Sea. We have no evidence that Italian or Catalan seafarers ever reached Iceland or Greenland at that time, but they were certainly able to acquire from northern European merchants goods of that origin to be transported to the Mediterranean area. The marinarii mentioned by Galvaneus can fit into this dynamic: the Genoese might have brought back to their city scattered news about these lands, some real and some fanciful, that they heard in the northern harbors from Scottish, British, Danish, Norwegian sailors with whom they were trading.⁷²72 Seaver, The Frozen Echo, pp. 120–4, claims that sea voyages toward west Greenland were made from the British Islands during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.View all notes The geographical treatise by ‘Alī ibn Mūsā ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī (written around 1250–1270) gives evidence of the trade of white falcons and white bears from northern Europe to the Mediterranean Sea:

The “island of white falcons” is supposed to be Iceland, known to Arabic geographers and represented, e.g., in the al-Idrīsī world map.⁷⁴74 On the al-Idrīsī world map cfr. S. Maqbul Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī,” in The History of Cartography, II: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, eds. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 156–74. The original, engraved on a silver plate in 1154 for Roger II, king of Sicily, is lost, but we access the map thanks to later copies dating back to the fourteenth century.View all notes Ibn Sa‘īd does not indicate the nationality of the merchants who brought the birds to the Sultan of Egypt; however, it is hard to think that the Genoese totally neglected such a lucrative trade, though evidence is lacking.

The news reported by Galvaneus about Marckalada/Markland, just like those about the less evanescent Greenland, remain isolated, and there is no trace of an early reception either in Latin geographical treatises or in the Mediterranean cartography. If Genoa was the gateway for these news, as we claim in the present article, it remains to be explained why no mention of these lands seems to be found in the Genoese mappae mundi or portolans of the fourteenth century,⁷⁵75 The only, very dubious trace of Markland in Mediterranean cartography could be connected with Madeira, whose Portuguese name means “wooded land,” “land of lumber.” According to an old and very uncertain hypothesis, the sailors who traveled the Atlantic, vaguely aware of the presence of some wooded land located westwards (the elusive Markland), might have identified it with a recently discovered island. See William H. Babcock, “Markland, otherwise Newfoundland,” Geographical Review 4 (1917), pp. 309–15: 309; Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic. A Study in Medieval Geography (New York: American Geographical Society, 1922), p. 114. Actually, Madeira entered the European geographical horizon in the second half of the fourteenth century, when it was just reached (probably) by Genoese navigators, since in the earliest documents that mention the island, its name is given in Italian: Isola de lo legname in the Medici Atlas (Firenze, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Gadd. Reliq. 9; dated 1351, although with more recent interpolations); Insula de legname in the Catalan Atlas of 1375 (Paris, BnF, ms. esp. 30; dated 1375); isla … que dizen Lecmane in the Libro del conoscimiento (dated c. 1390): El libro del conoscimiento de todos los reinos (The Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms), ed. Nancy F. Marino (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), p. 50. See Fischer, Sammlung mittelalterlicher Welt- und Seekarten, pp. 13–5; A Cortesão, The Nautical Chart of 1424 and the Early Discovery and Cartographical Representation of America. A Study on the History of Early Navigation and Cartography (Coimbra: University of Coimbra, 1954), p. 47; John Roland Seymour Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, 2^nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 149–50. A connection between Madeira and Galvaneus’s Marckalada seems to us doubtful: Galvaneus describes Marckalada not exactly as a “wooded land,” but rather as a “fertile land” (with “green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds”), and the geographical location that he indicates (west of Greenland) apparently refers to a much more northerly area of the Atlantic. Also the island of Brasil (Berzil, Brezil etc.), which frequently appears in fourteenth-century Atlantic maps, was tentatively identified with Markland: see Joseph Fischer, The Discoveries of the Norsemen in America. With Special Relation to Their Early Cartographical Representation (London: Stevens, 1903), pp. 94–101. This identification was rejected by Skelton (“The Vinland Map,” p. 182), as “too far-fetched for serious consideration.”View all notes nor in those produced in Majorca and Catalonia, closely linked with the Genoese tradition⁷⁶76 On the relationships between Genoese and Catalan (Majorcan) cartography, see Anne-Dorothee von den Brincken, Fines terrae. Die Enden der Erde und der vierte Kontinent auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), pp. 113–8; Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, “Da Génova a Venecia y Mallorca: la emigración de cartógrafos ligures y la expansión mediterránea de las cartas de navegar (s. XIV),” in Circolazione di uomini e scambi culturali tra città (secoli XII–XIV), (Pistoia and Roma: Centro italiano di studi di storia e d’arte and Viella, 2013), pp. 79–167.View all notes—actually, these charts do not disdain to use notions gathered from oral sources, as travelers and merchants are.⁷⁷77 Cfr. Ingrid Baumgärtner, “Weltbild und Empirie. Die Erweiterung des kartographischen Weltbilds durch die Asienreisen des späten Mittelalters,” Journal of Medieval History 23 (1997), pp. 227–53: 234; Ramon J. Pujades i Bataller, “Mappaemundi veneziane e catalane del basso medioevo: due rami nati da uno stesso tronco,” in Venezia e la nuova oikoumene. Cartografia del Quattrocento – Venedig und die neue Oikoumene. Kartographie im 15. Jahrhundert, eds. Ingrid Baumgärtner and Piero Falchetta (Roma: Viella, 2016), pp. 73–96: 75–6.View all notes This fact suggests a scenario of informality: the Genoese were interested in exploiting the “seafarers’ rumors” about the lands of the extreme north-west for eventual commercial benefit, but these rumors were too vague to find consistency in cartographic or scholarly representations.⁷⁸78 On the contrary, the news about Ethiopia reported by John of Carignano in his Tractatus de mappa and used by Galvaneus in the Cronica universalis (see note 62 and context), probably contributed to the geographical shifting of Priest John’s reign from Asia to Africa. In the western Middle Ages, the chart of John of Carignano seems to have been the first to indicate a Christian civilization in eastern Africa.View all notes

Despite its isolated position, and regardless of the assumptions that can be made about its provenance, Galvaneus’s narrative bears witness to the circulation of geographic knowledge between the Nordic and the Mediterranean world in the first half of the fourteenth century. Furthermore, it brings unprecedented evidence to the speculation that news about the American continent, derived from Nordic sources, circulated in Italy one and half centuries before Columbus.