1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance

One thing that greatly puzzled me when writing 1421 was the Olack of curiosity among many professional historians.

After all, Christopher Columbus supposedly discovered America in 1492. Yet eighteen years before he set sail, Columbus had a map of the Americas, which he later acknowledged in his logs. Indeed, even before his first voyage, Columbus signed a contract with the king and queen of Spain that appointed him viceroy of the Americas. His fellow ship’s captain Martín Alonso Pinzón, who sailed with him in 1492, had too seen a map of the Americas—in the pope’s library.

How do you discover a place for which you already have a map?

The same question could be asked of Magellan. The strait that connects the Atlantic to the Pacific bears the great Portuguese explorer’s name. When Magellan reached that strait in 1520, he had run out of food and his sailors were reduced to eating rats. Worse, they were convinced they were lost. Esteban Gómez led a mutiny, seizing the SanAntonio with the intent to lead part of the expedition back to Spain. Magellan quashed the mutiny by claiming he was not at all lost. A member of the crew wrote, “We all believed that [the Strait] was a cul-de-sac; but the captain knew that he had to navigate through a very well-concealed strait, having seen it in a chart preserved in the trea sury of the king of Portugal, and made by Martin of Bohemia, a man of great parts.”1 (#ulink_859bd649-1631-5867-9eef-deb09a144b1a)

Why was the strait named after Magellan when Magellan had seen it on a chart before he set sail? It doesn’t make sense.

The paradox might be explained had there been no maps of the strait or of the Pacific—if, as some believe, Magellan was bluffing about having seen a chart. But there were maps. Martin Waldseemüller published his map of the Americas and the Pacific in 1507, twelve years before Magellan set sail. In 1515, four years before Magellan sailed, Johannes Schöner published a map showing the strait Magellan is said to have “discovered.”

The mystery only deepens when we consider the two cartographers, Waldseemüller and Schöner. Were these two hoary old sea captains who had made heroic voyages across the Pacific before Magellan? Should we rename the strait after Schöner? Hardly.

Schöner never went to sea. He flunked his exams at the University of Erfurt, leaving without a degree. He became an apprentice priest in 1515 but for failing to celebrate mass, was relegated to a small village, where his punishment was officiating at early-morning mass. So how did a young man from rural Germany with no maritime tradition produce a map of the Pacific well before Magellan discovered that ocean?

Like Schöner, Waldseemüller had never seen the sea. Born in Wolfenweiler near Freiberg in 1475, he spent his working life as a cannon at Saint-Dié in eastern France—a region famed for its plums but completely devoid of maritime tradition. Waldseemüller, too, left university without a degree. Yet his map of the Americas showed the Sierra Madre of Mexico and the Sierra Nevada of North America before Magellan reached the Pacific or Balboa reached its coast.

These two rustic mapmakers were not the only Europeans with an uncanny prescience about unseen lands. In 1419, before European voyages of exploration even began, Albertin di Virga published a map of the Eastern Hemisphere that shows northern Australia. It was another 350 years before Captain Cook “discovered” that continent. Similarly, Brazil appeared on Portuguese maps before the first Portuguese, Cabral and Dias, set sail for Brazil. The South Shetland Islands were shown on the Piri Reis map four hundred years before Europeans reached the Antarctic.

The great European explorers were brave and determined men. But they discovered nothing. Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the globe, nor was Columbus the first to discover the Americas. So why, we may ask, do historians persist in propagating this fantasy? Why is The Times Atlas of World Exploration, which details the discoveries of European explorers, still taught in schools? Why are the young so insistently misled?

After 1421 was published, we set up our website, www.1421. tv, which has since received millions of visitors. Additionally we have received hundreds of thousands of e-mails from readers of 1421, many bringing new evidence to our attention. Of the criticism we’ve received, the most frequent complaint has concerned my failure to describe the Chinese fleets’ visits to Europe when the Renaissance was just getting under way.

Two years ago, a Chinese Canadian scholar, Tai Peng Wang, discovered Chinese and Italian records showing beyond a doubt that Chinese delegations had reached Italy during the reigns of Zhu Di (1403–1424) and the Xuan De emperor (1426–1435). Naturally, this was of the greatest interest to me and the research team.

Shortly after Tai Peng Wang’s 2005 discovery, my wife, Marcella, and I set off with friends for Spain. For a decade, we’ve enjoyed holidays with this same group of friends, traveling to seemingly inaccessible places—crossing the Andes, Himalayas, Karakorams, and Hindu Kush, voyaging down the Amazon, journeying to the glaciers of Patagonia and the high Altiplano of Bolivia. In 2005 we walked the Via de la Plata from Seville, from where the conquistadores sailed to the New World, north to their homeland of Extremadura. Along the way, we visited the towns in which the conquistadores were born and raised. One of these was Toledo, painted with such bravura by El Greco. Of particular interest to me were the medieval pumps by which this fortified mountain town drew its water from the river far below.

On a lovely autumn day, we walked uphill to the great cathedral that dominates Toledo and the surrounding countryside. We dumped our bags in a small hotel built into the cathedral walls and set off to explore. In a neighboring Moorish palace there was an exhibition dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci and his Madrid codices, focusing on his pumps, aqueducts, locks, and canals—all highly relevant to Toledo.

The exhibit contained this note: “Leonardo embarked upon a thorough analysis of waterways. The encounter with Francesco di Giorgio in Pavia in 1490 was a decisive moment in Leonardo’s training, a turning point. Leonardo planned to write a treatise on water.” This puzzled me. I had been taught that Leonardo had designed the first European canals and locks, that he was the first to illustrate pumps and fountains. So what relevant training had he received from Francesco di Giorgio, a name completely unknown to me?

My research revealed that Leonardo had owned a copy of di Giorgio’s treatise on civil and military machines. In the treatise, di Giorgio had illustrated and described a range of astonishing machines, many of which Leonardo subsequently reproduced in three-dimensional drawings. The illustrations were not limited to canals, locks, and pumps; they included parachutes, submersible tanks, and machine guns as well as hundreds of other machines with civil and military applications.

This was quite a shock. It seemed Leonardo was more illustrator than inventor and that the greater genius may have resided in di Giorgio. Was di Giorgio the original inventor of these fantastic machines? Or did he, in turn, copy them from another?

I learned that di Giorgio had inherited notebooks and treatises from another Italian, Mariano di Jacopo ditto Taccola (called Taccola: “the Crow”). Taccola was a clerk of public works living in Siena. Having never seen the sea or fought a battle, he nevertheless managed to draw a wide variety of nautical machines—paddle-wheeled boats, frogmen, and machines for lifting wrecks, together with a range of gunpowder weapons, even an advanced method of making gunpowder and designing a helicopter. It seems Taccola was responsible for nearly every technical illustration that di Giorgio and Leonardo had later improved upon.

So, once again, we confront our familiar puzzle: How did a clerk in a remote Italian hill town, a man who had never traveled abroad or obtained a university education, come to produce technical illustrations of such amazing machines?

This book attempts to answer that and a few related riddles. In doing so, we stumble upon the map of the Americas that Taccola’s contemporary Paolo Toscanelli sent to both Christopher Columbus and the king of Portugal, in whose library Magellan encountered it.

Like 1421, this book is a collective endeavor that never would have been written without the help of thousands of people across the world. I do not claim definitive answers to every riddle. This is a work in progress. Indeed, I hope readers will join us in the search for answers and share them with us—as so many did in response to 1421.

However, before we meet the Chinese squadron upon its arrival in Venice and then Florence, a bit of background is necessary on the aims of the Xuan De emperor for whom Grand Eunuch Zheng He served as ambassador to Europe. A Xuan De imperial order dated June 29, 1430, stated:

…Everything is prosperous and renewed but the Foreign Countries distantly located beyond the sea, still had not heard and did not know. For this reason Grand Directors Zheng He, Wang Jinghong and others were specially sent, bearing the word, to go and instruct them into deference and submission…

The first three chapters of this book describe the two years of preparations in China and Indonesia to fulfill that order, which required launching and provisioning the greatest fleet the world had ever seen for a voyage across the world. Chapter 4 explains how the Chinese calculated longitude without clocks and latitude without sextants—prerequisites for drawing accurate maps of new lands. Chapters 5 and 6 describe how the fleet left the Malabar Coast of India, sailed to the canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, then down the Nile into the Mediterranean. Some have argued that no Chinese records exist to suggest that Zheng He’s fleets ever left the Indian Ocean. Chapters 5 and 6 document the many records in China, Egypt, Dalmatia, Venice, Florence, and the Papal States describing the fleets’ voyage.

In chapter 21 I discuss the im mense transfer of knowledge that took place in 1434 between China and Europe. This knowledge originated with a people who, over a thousand years, had created an advanced civilization in Asia; it was given to Europe just as she was emerging from a millennium of stagnation following the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Renaissance has traditionally been portrayed as a rebirth of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. It seems to me the time has come to reappraise this Eurocentric view of history. While the ideals of Greece and Rome played an important role in the Renaissance, I submit that the transfer of Chinese intellectual capital to Europe was the spark that set the Renaissance ablaze.

The internet has revolutionized the historian’s profession, and though it is not necessary for readers to visit the 1434 website, it does contain a great deal of additional information about China’s role in the Renaissance. On occasion in the text, I make reference to specific subjects that are discussed in greater detail on the website. I believe that many will find this interesting. The 1421 website has also become a forum for discussion, and I hope the same will be true for 1434. When you have read the book, please tell us whether you agree with its conclusions.

Gavin Menzies

New York

July 17, 2007

Notes

Introduction

1 (#ulink_9842727c-8cab-5841-b166-9cb194f04613). Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation trans. R. A. Skelton. (Cambridge, Mass.: Folio Society 1975) p. 49.

I (#uc537f433-04dd-5617-9775-45c71e911f26)

Setting the Scene (#uc537f433-04dd-5617-9775-45c71e911f26)

1 (#uc537f433-04dd-5617-9775-45c71e911f26)

A LAST VOYAGE (#uc537f433-04dd-5617-9775-45c71e911f26)

In the summer of 1421 the emperor Zhu Di lost a stupendous gamble. In doing so, he lost control of China and, eventually, his life.

Zhu Di’s dreams were so outsized that, though China in the early fifteenth century was the greatest power on earth, it still could not summon the means to realize the emperor’s monumental ambitions. Having embarked on the simultaneous construction of the Forbidden City, the Ming tombs, and the Temple of Heaven, China was also building two thousand ships for Zheng He’s fleets. These vast projects had denuded the land of timber. As a consequence, eunuchs were sent to pillage Vietnam. But the Vietnamese leader Le Loi fought the Chinese with great skill and courage, tying down the Chinese army at huge financial and psychological cost. China had her Vietnam six hundred years before France and America had theirs.1 (#ulink_d5a2b773-954b-5b53-8f00-89a437b859ce)

China’s debacle in Vietnam grew out of the costs of building and maintaining her trea sure fleets, through which the emperor sought to bring the entire world into Confucian harmony within the Chinese tribute system. The fleets were led by eunuchs—brave sailors who were intensely loyal to the emperor, permanently insecure, and ready to sacrifice all. However, the eunuchs were also uneducated and frequently corrupt. And they were loathed by the mandarins, the educated administrative class that buttressed a Confucian system in which every citizen was assigned a clearly defined place.

Superb administrators, the mandarins recoiled from risk. They disapproved of the extravagant adventures of the trea sure fleets, whose far-flung exploits had the added disadvantage of bringing them into contact with “long nosed barbarians.” In the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), mandarins were the lowest class.2 (#ulink_bcaebcee-7618-5322-9189-5ec6e6258634) However, in the Ming dynasty, Emperor Hong Wu, Zhu Di’s father, reversed the class system to favor mandarins.

The mandarins planned Hong Wu’s attack on his son Zhu Di, the Prince of Yen, whom Hong had banished to Beijing (Nanjing then being the capital of China). The eunuchs sided with Zhu Di, joining his drive south into Nanjing. After his victory in 1402, Zhu Di expressed his gratitude by appointing eunuchs to command the trea sure fleets.

Henry Tsai paints a vivid portrait of Zhu Di, also known as the Yongle emperor:

He was an overachiever. He should be credited for the construction of the imposing Forbidden City of Beijing, which still stands today to amaze countless visitors from lands afar. He should be applauded for sponsoring the legendary maritime expeditions of the Muslim eunuch Admiral Zheng He, the legacy of which still lives vividly in the historical consciousness of many Southeast Asians and East Africans. He reinforced the power structure of the absolutist empire his father the Hongwu emperor founded, and extended the tentacles of Chinese civilisation to Vietnam, Korea, Japan, among other tributary states of Ming China. He smoothed out China’s relations with the Mongols from whom Emperor Hongwu had recovered the Chinese empire. He made possible the compilation of various important Chinese texts, including the monumental encyclopaedia Yongle dadian….

Yongle [the alternative name for Zhu Di] was also a usurper, a man who bathed his hands in the blood of numerous political victims. And the bloodshed did not stop there. After ascending the throne, he built a well-knit information network staffed by eunuchs whom his father had specifically blocked from the core of politics, to spy on scholar officials [mandarins] who might challenge his legitimacy and his absolutism.3 (#ulink_6e2e1607-810c-59f8-9c62-3d39caf82e51)

Under Zhu Di, the mandarins were relegated to organizing the finances necessary to build the fleet. But for generations of mandarins who governed the Ming dynasty and compiled almost all Chinese historical sources, the voyages led by Zheng He were a deviation from the proper path. The mandarins did all they could to belittle Zheng He’s achievements. As Edward L. Dreyer points out, Zheng He’s biography in the Ming-Shi-lu was deliberately placed before a series of chapters on eunuchs “who are grouped with ‘flatterers and deceivers,’ ‘treacherous ministers,’ ‘roving bandits’ and ‘all intrinsically evil categories of people.’”4 (#ulink_94142cc2-53a4-58cc-b6bc-3ef6c78c693a)

As long as the voyages prospered, and tribute flowed back to the Middle Kingdom to finance the fleet’s adventures, the simmering rivalry between mandarins and eunuchs could be contained. However, in the summer of 1421, Zhu Di’s reign went horribly wrong. First, the Forbidden City, which had cost vast sums to build, was burned to ashes by a thunderbolt. Next, the emperor became impotent and was taunted by his concubines. In a final indignity, he was thrown from his horse, a present from Tamburlaine’s son Shah Rokh.5 (#ulink_4a4760a5-28b6-598c-91f8-bf2e6a7c9565) It appeared that Zhu Di had lost heaven’s favor.

In December 1421, at a time when Chinese farmers were reduced to eating grass, Zhu Di embarked on another extravaganza. He led an enormous army into the northern steppe to fight the Mongol armies of Aruqtai, who had refused to pay tribute.6 (#ulink_651794e6-cba0-5a9b-9b77-aa5feb9ed057)

This was too much for Xia Yuanji, the minister of finance; he refused to fund the expedition. Zhu Di had his minister arrested along with the minister of justice, who had also objected to the adventure. Fang Bin, the minister of war, committed suicide. With his finances in ruins and his cabinet in revolt, the emperor rode off to the steppe, where he was outwitted and outmaneuvered by Aruqtai. On August 12, 1424, Zhu Di died.7 (#ulink_532e127c-6580-5db5-a9a1-1ed9b0b72b99)