In all our conferences on the rediscovery of the Canary Islands, I have always maintained that the history of the beginning of the Modern Age and the "New World" must be rewritten. A new unpublished manuscript leads us to believe that it should be traced back to 1312 (year of the rediscovery of the Canary Islands); that is, 180 years before 1492 (year of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus and date of reference to the present day for marking the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age).
In fact, the Canary Islands, from the travel company of the Italian discoverer, became the springboard for new geographical discovery companies, until the discovery of America by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus.
However, in 2021 a group of students from the State University of Milan (Italy) found an ancient unpublished medieval manuscript, called "Cronica Universalis", written around 1340 by the Dominican friar Galvano Fiamma.
Well, the manuscript of Friar Galvano Fiamma, which, as already mentioned, is believed to have been written at least 150 years before the landing of Christopher Columbus in America, confirms my reasons, because it anticipates the discovery of America by about 150 years, making it substantially coincide with the time of the rediscovery of the Canary Islands, which, in my opinion, should be taken as a reference to designate, historically, the beginning of the Modern Age and the discovery of the so-called "New World".
The concept of "New World", in fact, can also be attributed to those islands that, rediscovered about seven hundred years ago by Malocello, after centuries of oblivion, make up, at present, the Canary Archipelago, whose definitive conquest, by the Europeans, took place at the end of the 14th century.
If in the work of Friar Galvano Fiamma, written in Gothic script from northern Italy, reference is made to a land called Marckalada that scholars have identified as the Latinization of Markland cited in the Nordic sagas, the study published in the journal Terrae Incognitae documents the awareness, already around 1340, of the existence of lands beyond the Atlantic, also outside Scandinavia, such as Greenland and, further west, America itself. Probably the author of the manuscript reports oral information from Genoa, a city with which he had contact, and that the sailors mentioned in the text are Genoese navigators who traded with the peoples of the North.
Therefore, this being the first mention of the American continent in the Mediterranean region, it constitutes evidence of the circulation, far from the Nordic area, 150 years before Christopher Columbus, of narratives in lands beyond Greenland. Therefore, everything we know to date about the discovery of America, that is, about the event that, traditionally, marks the beginning of modern history, is suddenly revolutionized with a remarkable leap back in time, necessarily having to rewrite an entire chapter of history, coinciding with what has always been supported by myself and by the International Committee for the Celebrations of the VII Centenary of the rediscovery of the Canary Islands that I have the honor to chair.
Until now, on the one hand, the feat of Lanzarotto Malocello to rediscover the Canary Islands has been incredibly ignored and on the other, just as erroneously, it has always been thought that no one had news of the American continent before the expedition of Christopher Columbus.
The logical conclusion lies, therefore, after the sensational documentary discovery of the aforementioned text, in tracing the beginning of the Modern Age, precisely, to the historical-geographical event of the rediscovery of the Canary Islands that allowed the beginning of that entire sequence of maritime voyages, destined for the discovery and overseas expeditions of new lands. In my opinion, the new and unpublished research will certainly produce disconcerting surprises about Historical-Geographical facts and will force researchers and historians, in the future, to update one of the most relevant events that occurred in the World.
