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

Menzies, Gavin

3.46

1,495 ratings by Goodreads

9780007269372: 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007269374 ISBN 13: 9780007269372

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2008

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In his bestselling book 1421:The Year China Discovered the World, Gavin Menzies revealed that it was the Chinese that discovered America, not Columbus. Now he presents further astonishing evidence that it was also Chinese advances in science, art, and technology that formed the basis of the European Renaissance and our modern world.

In his bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, Gavin Menzies presented controversial and compelling evidence that Chinese fleets beat Columbus, Cook and Magellan to the New World. But his research has led him to astonishing new discoveries that Chinese influence on Western culture didn’t stop there.

Until now, scholars have considered that the Italian Renaissance - the basis of our modern Western world - came about as a result of a re-examining the ideas of classical Greece and Rome. However, a stunning reappraisal of history is about to be published.

Gavin Menzies makes the startling argument that a sophisticated Chinese delegation visited Italy in 1434, sparked the Renaissance, and forever changed the course of Western civilization. After that date the authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy was overturned and artistic conventions challenged, as was Arabic astronomy and cartography.

Florence and Venice of the 15th century attracted traders from across the world. Menzies presents astonishing evidence that a large Chinese fleet, official ambassadors of the Emperor, arrived in Tuscany in 1434 where they met with Pope Eugenius IV in Florence. A mass of information was offered by the Chinese delegation to the Pope and his entourage - concerning world maps (which Menzies argues were later given to Columbus), astronomy, mathematics, art, printing, architecture, steel manufacture, civil engineering, military machines, surveying, cartography, genetics, and more. It was this gift of knowledge that sparked the inventiveness of the Renaissance - Da Vinci's inventions, the Copernican revolution, Galileo, etc. Following 1434, Europeans embraced Chinese intellectual ideas, discoveries, and inventions, which formed the basis of European civilization just as much as Greek thought and Roman law.

In short, China provided the spark that set the Renaissance ablaze.

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Review:

‘Menzies has come up with something entirely new...it is a startling claim.’ Guardian

From the Back Cover:

In 1434 a sophisticated Chinese delegation visited Italy. After that date the authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy was overturned, and Chinese knowledge ignited the work of geniuses such as da Vinci, Copernicus and Galileo.

China's influence had sparked the Renaissance. The course of Western civilization was changed forever.

Following on from the bestselling 1421, Gavin Menzies' controversial new book 1434 charts the final voyage of the Imperial Chinese fleet. His astonishing discoveries about China's legacy in Europe brilliantly rewrite the history of our modern world.

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