Page 48 - Lanzarotto Malocello from Italy to the Canary Islands

48 from Italy to the Canary Islands

that was conceived and properly planned with the precise awareness of the
new needs to be addressed and to resolve, including thanks to the expe-
riences and studies gained in the decades immediately prior to this in the
Genoese trading environment, which, from 1277, had proven to be able
to establish regular trading relations via sea with England and Flanders,
having begun to tackle the problems posed by the new type of navigation
and by the new type of routes that would have to be followed on exiting
the Mediterranean basin.
The Genoese were in fact among the first to obtain noteworthy, inno-
vative results in the field of navigational charts, a discipline which, thanks
especially to them, reached an appreciable level of perfection precise-
ly between the end of the 1200s and the start of the 1300s. They were
also among the first to make substantial progress in the field of maritime
technology, with the building of new types of vessels, which were more
seaworthy, and with more and more frequent recourse to fundamentally
important instruments for orientation and setting the routes, such as the
magnetic needle, the nautical compass with compass rose, and the astro-
nomical astrolabe. It should be remembered that a Genoese, contemporary
of the Vivaldi brothers, Andalò di Negro, is believed to have written an
essay in those years on the astrolabe (Opus praeclarissimi astrolabii); and
we should also attribute the work Chompasso per mostrare a navichare
tutte le terre, marine et isole, to a Genoese sailor and merchant, as it is very
likely that he wrote it. This work can also be attributed to the second half
th
of the 13 century.
In this way, already from the mid-1200s, the Genoese could be found at
the centre of that series of processes which helped Latin Christianity grad-
ually take on shape and thickness, from both a demographic and a techno-
logical point of view, with a consequent increase in population and in the
volume of communications, to the extent of projecting it, over the course
of two centuries, into a global dimension, in what Immanuel Wallerstein
defined as a “world-economy”.
In order to achieve this radical change in the vision of the world and in
the purpose and use of its spaces, a fully-fledged scientific and cultural rev-
olution, driven by the needs initiated by an altered political and economic
situation, was needed, which, over the course of two centuries, would be
able to make available to all those who might need it, all the mathematical
knowledge discovered and perfected by Arabic-Jewish-Christian science,
to develop trigonometric tables which were fairly easy for sailors to use