He literally wrote in his will that he was born in Genoa

Italy didn't exist at the time and his real name was Cristoffa Corombo. Cristoforo Colombo is the Italian translation

We've gotten used to old ancient writings from Abrahamic religions being so off kilter, we forgot that the same pattern didn't apply to the rest.

The Native Americans on the West coast accurately tracked multiple natural disasters that were evidenced later.

Can anyone recommend a non-fiction book set in the Middle Ages that features court intrigue? I’m not overly concerned about the specific time, place, or event. The ideal book would be somewhat zoomed-in so that I can familiarize myself with the parties and relationships. I’m also not concerned if the book is accused of glossing over debated specifics for the sake of framing the event and parties in a clear and compelling narrative. Thanks, All!

It's kinda interesting how indigenous folklore the world around so often holds memory of distant historical events and yet whenever those events are confirmed it's still surprising somehow. We didn't invent remembering history we just started to write it down better

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The Persian empire took control of Anatolia which had many Greek Colonies like Pergamon, Rhodes, Sardes, etc. They had subjects which spoke both Persian and Greek.

Finished The Western Front by Richard Holmes

>4.5/5 rounding down for Goodreads.

>Very good. Written alongside a documentary series so it is accessible. It is good at describing the details of the battles as well as broader analysis on things such as the conditions that led to trench warfare. Mostly focused on the British perspective but does have a good chapter on Verdun. Plenty of maps and photos that are pretty good in quality. Sometimes it mentions the historical debates about things like tactics or leadership, but this book is 20 years old now so views and scholarship have probably changed a bit since then. It does have a further reading list as well for each chapter but again it is an old book and will not have newer books on it. Overall I'd say it is a good place to start if you are interested in the Western Front of WWI.

>Sidenote - Holmes' Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-18 is very good but a lot longer and more indepth and I'd also recommend reading that if you are interested in WWI. His books 'Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750-1914' and 'Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket' are also very good.

Finished today The Zimmerman Telegram by Barbara Tuchman

>3/5. For a £1 Kindle book it was fine but I wouldn't recommend specifically seeking it out.

>OK from a story telling point of view but it is very old and there are probably newer and better books on the subject. For example her descriptions of the situation on the Western Front were pretty simplistic and bad. A lot of the book focuses on what was going on in Mexico as well as US-Mexico relations and US-Japanese relations prior to Zimmerman sending the telegram. These parts felt fine to me but I don't know a lot about the Americas or the Mexican revolution in this period so I probably won't have noticed anything wrong or any outdated historical views. Also a lot on the lives and feelings of the various diplomats, ambassadors and advisors.

On Kindle I've now started The Western Front: A History of the Great War, 1914-1918 by Nick Lloyd but it will probably take me a long time to read (I read his Hundred Days: The End of the Great War earlier this year and really liked it and would recomend it if into WWI). Physical I've started The Last Corsair: The Story of the Emden by Dan van der Vat which seems fine so far (40 pages in) and is rather shorter.

First of all, there was plenty of international trade going on, so a surprising number of people probably spoke multiple languages. Merchants in particular, as well as bureaucrats responsible for customs duties and tax collection probably spoke multiple languages.

Secondly, most rulers probably had multiple scribes who were each literate in multiple languages as well.

There were also probably common languages as well, most likely originated in the big empires. So, a lot of people probably spoke Greek, Latin, Egyptian, or Persian to some extent.

I grew up in an Italian American area in NY. Basically every single Italian American I knew growing up was a Columbus super fan, my family outright thinks that every negative thing said about him was a lie (fun fact, I read a passage from a translation of his journal and they said it was written by a liberal to make him look bad until I revealed Columbus wrote it himself), and attach tons of Italian-American ethnic pride to this dude who existed centuries before Italy was a country and never set foot in the USA (minus some Caribbean territories).

Yeah. He was the one to you know, actually bother to record what he was doing and spread the information.

One thing is for sure, the more we learn, the less we know.

The official language of the Persian Empire was Aramaic, a Semitic language. The Persians sent letters Aramaic written in cuneiform to Sparta. Aramaic was the linga franca of the Middle East from about 700 BCE until about 700 CE, when another Semitic language, Arabic, took over.

Old Persian was similar in many ways to Ancient Greek, but the languages were not mutually comprehensible.

He never wrote a word of italian, sorry to dispel your fantasy.

Portuguese tinfoil hat on:

Columbus was a Portuguese plant meant to distract the Spanish from competing in the African route to India, that's part of the wrongful insistence on them being "Indians".

Other things:

-Most of the names he gave to new found land were names of villages close to his hometown of Cuba, Alentejo (south of Portugal). Portuguese Cuba was called Cuba since at least the 13th century.

-He wrote in Castellan with typical errors of Portuguese natives.

-The papal bull regarding his travels write his name using exclusively Portuguese accent characters (the ~)

-In his early days, he married a Portuguese noblewoman from Madeira and lived with her there (very far from his supposed hometown where the names come from), something very hard to achieve if he was actually just a Genoan wool weaver.

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Some other theories say that he actually wanted to go to America, and was refused by the Portuguese king, and that's why he went to the work for the Spanish.

So they opened up his supposed cousin's tomb because no one will grant them access to Columbus' own bones? If there was a legitimate argument about his ancestry, wouldn't going directly to the source be better.

Translators are obviously rarely explicitly mentioned in histories, but Caesar at some point for instance mentions changing translators due to questionable loyalty of his allies the Aedui, who apparently supplied them.

This detail has been of some interest in the discussions about the languages spoken in Gaul in Caesar's time, because it might explain why 'Germanic' tribes/chiefs/places have 'Celtic' names: the possibility of adoption of exonyms from the Gaulish language of his translators as a bridge between Latin and third languages.

> They suggest that the islands could be the remnants of a low-lying landscape underlain by soft glacial deposits laid down during the last ice age. Since then, forces of erosion have worn away the land, reducing it to islands, before these too were worn away and disappearing by the sixteenth century.

I’m sure there are those people, but we should also remember that people died to make Columbus day a thing for Italian Americans. Just seems weird to take a day away from one people and give it to another because the country oppressed them more.

As others have pointed out, there were plenty of polylingual people back then, and the Persians in particular would have had access to lots of subjects who were fluent in Greek, because they were Greek.

Another thing to recognize is that there were probably at least two languages that were widely understood because they belonged to people who engaged in lots of long-distance trade across the Mediterranean basin. One of those was, of course, Greek, since several wealthy Greek city-states (e.g., Athens, Corinth, Syracuse) did a lot of maritime trade. The other would have been Punic (Phoenician), and the home cities for that language were under Persian rule throughout the period.

Heavy agriculture tends to do that with bodies of water. Look up history of Missouri. Poor river.

How Interpreters Helped Topple the Aztec Empire / NativLang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWtQznfkDHU Check out this video. It does at least explain Cortez' case

Mark Peattie's *Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941 gets cited on the /r/askhistorians threads about this.

This answer has a list of sources too: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/970sif/what_was_the_relationship_between_the_ija_and_the/

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This of Europe today... Back then, those who could travel knew far more than today's travel able Europeans (whom are already known for know 3/4 languages just cos Europe)