The Outer World in the European Middle Ages

Abstract

Although the final significance of the discovery by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus of a series of islands is still a matter of dispute, there can be little doubt that this event proved to be a turning-point in the history both of the discoverers themselves and of the peoples whom they discovered. A twentieth-century student of medieval Europe's relations with and perceptions of the outer world can have a much broader view of the subject than his medieval predecessor. Theories about the origins and distribution of the earth's peoples owed much both to classical and Christian ideas. Medieval Europeans had acquired a very varied experience of the world and of its peoples well before the opening of the New World by Columbus and his successors. In a few rare instances, notably Iceland, they found and settled lands that were empty of people or, like Greenland, were so vast that for most practical purposes they were unoccupied.