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

1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance is a book by amateur historian Gavin Menzies. Menzies argues that by 1434 delegations had reached Italy during the reigns of and the Xuande Emperor Menzies claims that the delegations had a series of meetings with the Pope and his court. According to ''1434,'' the consequences of these meetings were of great importance because they took place just as Europe was emerging from a millennium of stagnation following the fall of the Roman Empire. Menzies argues that, while the ideals of the civilisations of Greece and Rome undoubtedly played an important role in the Renaissance, the transfer of Chinese intellectual capital to Europe was the spark that set the Renaissance ablaze.

Issues with conclusions drawn by Menzies

On closer examination, there are problems with this hypothesis.
Several major items of knowledge originated in China and were found later in the West. Although Menzies cites Robert Temple's ''The Genius of China'' as a source he ignores the following points made by Temple:
*The stirrup was invented in the third century CE and was introduced into the Byzantine Empire in 580.
*Porcelain was invented in China in the third century CE and was independently re-invented in England by Josiah Wedgewood in the eighteenth century.
*Printing was invented in China in the eighth century and woodblock printing was introduced into Europe before the middle of the fourteenth century, not in 1434. Johannes Gutenberg began to use movable type in 1458, though it did not appear in Italy first, but in Germany; there is no indication of its transmission from a visiting Chinese embassy, as woodblock printing had been practiced for more than one hundred years already in Europe.
*The idea of the circulation of the blood was brought to the Near East by al-Nafis and the works of this Arab were translated by Servetus, Renaldus Columbus and others, not working from information transmitted in 1434.
*The compass was found in Europe by 1180, mentioned first by Alexander Neckham.
*A form of stern hung, centreline rudder was invented in China in the first century CE. A quite different form of sterm hung, centreline rudder is referred to in documents and images in the west in the 12th century, for example in Alexander of Neckham in 1180, though it was probably in use earlier. Some scholars suggest it first appeared in Scandinavia, not Italy.
* The crossbow was used extensively in Medieval warfare; for example there were a large number of Genoese crossbowmen at the battle of Crecy in 1346.
*Gunpowder was known in China by the 800s CE, and in the West by the late 1200s. Not in 1434. The English had gunpowder cannon at the battle of Crecy in 1346 after previously using it against the Scots and further the French had also used cannon.Also during the seige of Orleans in 1428-1429 both sides used large numbers of cannon.

A further problem with Menzies' idea is that the Renaissance, as its name implies, was a period of the rebirth of Greek and Roman ideas, not of Chinese ideas. Giotto painted long before 1434 and Dante Alighieri created his Divine Comedy as well; Petrarch's sonnets were finished long before 1434. Leonardo da Vinci lived and painted after 1434, but he painted Christ, the saints and Italian nobles, not the Buddha or Chinese emperors or sages.

Menzies claims that the Veronese artist Pisanello sketched Mongol figures in Venice in the 1430s and that Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who never left Tuscany, painted "The Martyrdom of Francescan Friars" in the church of San Francesco Siena, depicting Chinese merchants with conical hats. Previously, oriental eyes had appeared in faces painted by Giotto and Duccio. To back this claim, Menzies uses a quote from Leonard Olschki's ''Asiatic Exoticism in Italian Art of the Early Renaissance'', “the impression has been given that Tuscany was almost a neighbouring country of the great Mongolian Empire and that Mandarins, Khans and Oriental dignitaries were almost as much at home in Florence and Siena as in Peking, Trebizond and Calicut.” To put this quote in context, the next sentences say "It is through these exaggerations and a corresponding lack of criticism and discernment that a few allusions to distant or fabulous countries in popular poems of the Quattrocento, drawn from antique texts and from reminiscences, have been interpreted as documents of an alleged "fureur asiatique" burning in the brains of the hard working and very positive Tuscan people. This is mere hallucination." The more likely explanation, as mentioned in Philippe Aries and Georges Duby's ''History of Private Life'', is the number of Tartar slaves in the Italian city-states, who served as models for the paintings.

Although Olschki acknowledges that there a "few but impressive cases in which a real representation of Asiatic types in the Italian art of the Renaissance appears to exist beyond doubt" he continues:

The essential question is how to explain the Mongolian heads of the men in Lorenzetti's fresco or Pisanello's and Gozzoli's Asiatic archers. The scholars who constructed complicated systems of far-fetched hypotheses for the solution of this riddle overlooked a very obvious and simple fact. During the Renaissance, Italy, and especially Florence, had a considerable Asiatic population of recent immigration and settlement. The historians of Italian orientalism in art and life have overlooked the slave markets of Venice, Genoa, Florence, Naples, and most of the large and small towns in Italy, which harbored a particularly busy section of the Asiatic slave trade in Europe. A multitude of documents, still preserved in Italian archives, many of them carefully edited in easily accessible publications, reveal that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Mongolian slaves were preferred, in Florence and elsewhere, for indoor work and every kind of hard or degrading labor.