Why didn’t news of the Viking discovery of North America spread to other parts of Europe?
Given that these Vikings had been christianized (to an extent) by 1000 AD and invaded lands far to the south, you’d think that news of such a discovery would have travelled (by priests or other Vikings) to other more civilized parts of Europe. Perhaps it did, but (as far as is evident ) why was it not known to the Portuguese or Spanish? I would be interested in some theories. I have not read any so far.
Not an absolute answer, but the Scandinavian that went viking were known to guard their navigation and ship building skills and knowledge as trade secrets. That might be all there is to it.
It may have spread to some extent, but been largely forgotten simply because stories about a land far away, covered with forest and with a more or less hostile indigenous population of hunters dressed in skins didn’t appeal much to the mighty and rich. They wanted gold…!
One fact is Vikings tended to be murdering, raping, thieves to much of continental Europe. They would not be telling sagas of Leif Ericson when they ate torturing a monk to find out where the abbey’s gold is. Also the sagas themselves don’t really talk about anything extraordinary. No cities of gold, 10 foot high men with two heads or a Christian kingdom of Prester John. They mention cultivating wine (which may be shady salesmanship or a mis translation of pastures) but lots of places could produce wine before the Little Ice Age.
Even when you had more definite knowledge, it could take decades to do something. Henry VII of England hire John Cabot to explore the New World in the 1490s. It wasn’t until his granddaughter Elizabeth 90 years later the English tried to establish a colony in Roanoke (which failed) and 20 years after that when James I could establish peace with Spain to found Jamestown.
A modern equivalent might be manned space exploration. We probably could establish manned colonies on the moon but no government really sees the need to send people up there to hit golf balls in a low gravity environment (a reference to Alan Shepard on Apollo 14).
In 1000 AD Southern Europe barely knew about Scandinavia. Why would they care about Scandinavians discovering more empty forests?
All the factors that prompted the age of discovery were hundreds of years in the future, and even then the primary focus for a couple of hundred years was finding and extracting valuable resources, which is much more easily done by discovering trading partners/potential conquests.
And to swing back to the first paragraph. Southern Europe spent a few hundred years from 1000 AD and onwards busy discovering and starting trading with Scandinavia, allowing Scandinavia to develop and utilize its natural resources. Knowing there were more forests way over at the other side of a dangerous North Atlantic, without all the interesting Scandinavians to trade with, would just have been uninteresting if possibly more widely known in the early days. The Greenland colony survived for at least four hundred years, but was never a good trading partner, more a quaint gamble/refuge. So the completely uninteresting knowledge that there was a source of timber (big whoop) even further away than Greenland, would unsurprisingly wither away until the search for trading partners and conquests rediscovered it as a side effect.
They tended to be traders and explorers and settlers. Those stories aren’t as interesting though, so they are often overlooked for the minority of more spectacular raiding adventures. The proportions don’t matter much though, just a smidgen of the actual amicable encounters are needed to refute your point about not sharing the saga of Leif Eiriksson while torturing monks.
By the time Leif went to America the vikings already had extensive settlements in England anyway, and there was as much organized wars of conquest as raiding for riches, further negating the point.
It was never clear even to the Vikings that they discovered what we now know of as North America. They knew only that they had found some widely scattered islands of various sizes.
Those islands were good for exiling troublemakers to, and maybe supplied fish and furs to the mainland. Even if they talked about those islands why would any other country want to go thousands of miles out their way to a repellent climate gather nothing in return? The islands were at the very edge of Viking travel, so they were beyond reach in centuries when trans-ocean travel was impossible. Hopping islands against Viking resistance was equally infeasible. Contrary to legend, explorers didn’t go off sailing into unknown because of adventure: they did so for profit or necessity. Neither applied here.
There’s also the issue that most Vikings may not have known about the Vikings who went to America. It’s not like they had conventions where everyone discussed last year’s voyages. The Vikings who traveled to Greenland and Newfoundland were not the same Vikings who were raiding in England and France or were serving as mercenaries in Constantinople.
I’ve heard the hypothesis that rumors did spread, and that hearing these rumors was part of why Columbus was convinced (correctly) that there was land reachable across the Atlantic. He was wrong about just what land it was, of course, but he was correct that there was land there.
In antiquity Thule (if considered a real place) generally appears to refer to Scandinavia. By the Middle Ages it was sometimes used to refer to Iceland or perhaps Greenland.
Isn’t part of that discussion often the false notion that “The Earth is flat” was a belief of navigators back then, whereas in fact the question was more about the distance to China and India on the western route being to large?
Columbus could of course have been convinced that these rumors helped bolster the calculations he was using that showed you could reach China by sailing west with the current level of technology, but I think it’s important to remember that he wasn’t looking for a New World. He was looking for a short-cut to an already known one.
Keep in mind that the Vikings did most of their raiding before the discovery of Vinland. There was some raiding afterwards, but most of what we think of as “Vikings sacking Medieval Monasteries” happened in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries. The Vikings themselves (Scandinavians) mostly converted to Christianity in the 11th Century. This is not so much an answer to the OP as a remark on the posts here that emphasize “Viking raids”.
Greenland at least was in communication with Norway for hundreds of years. From the 12th to the 14th centuries churches in Greenland were subject to dioceses in Norway, and later it was subject to the Norwegian king. But by the mid 15th century communication had been mostly lost and the colony had died out.
North America was of limited interest even for the Greenlanders. They may have obtained wood or other goods there, but never really attempted to colonize it. If knowledge of Greenland had become tenuous by the 1400s, it’s not surprising no one knew of North America.
Right. Even if Columbus had known about Greenland and Vinland, all that meant was that there were some scattered islands in the far north (since Vinland was not known to be a continent). Big deal. There would be no reason to conclude they were part of Asia or part of a short-cut to China and Japan.
Nobody knows exactly what rumors Columbus heard, so this can’t be disproven. But it doesn’t strike me as likely that rumors of a scattered island chain near the Arctic Circle made for good proof that sailing west from Spain would lead to tropical Asia.
I might buy stories of the Basques and Bretons finding cod banks across the Atlantic as encouragement, and people might be conflating them with the Vikings.
The people from Scandinavia discovered and populated Iceland. The people from Iceland discovered and colonized Greenland. They also went a bit farther and found more places, but (if you’ve ever seen Newfoundland) nothing like a land flowing with milk and honey. So it was twice removed, and it’s not like news was carried back to Scandinavia on a regular basis.
Nevertheless, read Jared Diamond’s account of the Greenland colony in “Collapse”. By the late 1300’s, a century-long cold spell came by and ships had trouble making it to Greenland. Wood to make ships was rare in Iceland and non-existent in Greenland. The last bishop of Greenland never even bothered trying to get there. (Don’t recall if he even got to Iceland). Things kind of fell off the map, and interest was very low in trying to sail to lands - as they thought - closed off by pack ice.
Then again, Europe in 1492 was trying to go all over the world, to get to India and points east. They were eager for news of what lay where in the oceans, and willing to try long voyages. In 1300, it’s not like there was a central registry of news about what people were up to, and word of mouth was, like the internet, full of fake news and dubious sources. Particularly all people knew was that if you went Northwest, you would hit Iceland and areas of freezing cold and pack ice… not spices and bare-breasted maidens.
Bear in mind that the printing press revolutionized the very spreading of news- a thousand copies of anything interesting enough that people wanted to read it could be printed and distributed throughout Europe in a few months. Before that all you had was literally word of mouth.
