Page 254 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

254 from Italy to the Canary Islands

from two Greek words, namely “astron” and “lambano”, which together
mean “taking the stars”. Archaeologists found a rudimentary astrolabe dat-
nd
ing from the 2 century BC, which due to such dating some attributed to
Hipparchus of Nicaea, who invented the astronomical system of epicycles.
The latest evolution of the astrolabe is ascribed to the Arab geographer
Leo Africanus (1485-1554). A mariner’s astrolabe is composed essentially
of four parts: a graduated ring called “mater”, a rotating arm around said
circle with a pivot equipped bar fixed to the centre of the circle called
“alidade”, a thin disk inside the larger ring (indicating the whole celestial
sphere) called “climate” and finally a rotating structure showing the loca-
tion of well known “fixed” stars called “rete”.
Caddeo reports that the Genoese were so far ahead that even the Arabs
copied from them: Abulfeda would acknowledge it openly in 1321 and
Suleiman Abu Daud would use an Italian globe in 1317, calling it “bab-
mandu” (a corruption of “mappamondo”, Italian for globe) in his work
The Garden of the Learned, and finally the Sultan of Egypt had Domenico
D’Oria give him a map of Asia Minor.
Their increased technical skills allowed the Genoese navigators to find
their way around all the seas and here we recall that Prof. Surdich (Verso il
nuovo mondo [Towards the New World], p. 5) states that the beginning of
Atlantic navigations should be traced back to 1277, because it appears that
in that year a fleet from Genoa had sailed past the “Pillars of Hercules” to
reach Britain and Flanders, thus beginning navigation in the Atlantic for
commercial purposes. This navigation for profit would eventually grant
Europeans (especially the Mediterranean peoples) an availability of means
three times higher than that of the most prosperous non-Europeans (at the
time, the subjects of the Chinese Empire).
Professor Francesco Surdich, however, attributes this increased avail-
ability of resources not only to these navigation techniques but also to the
use of square sails in the high seas rather than triangular sails (lateen sails,
better suited for coastal explorations), which were applied to the masts
of sailing ships such as the “carracks” (three-masted six-hundred-tonne
ships) and the caravels (two-masted seventy-tonne ships).
As it was, all of these navigation techniques were designed to increase
knowledge and trade; and here we return to the original question: what
effects were obtained with these increased techniques?
th
As a point of fact, the 14 century was one of great crises (especially
economic ones), which were made a lot worse by the demographic crisis;