“This whole fantasy about Europe discovering the world is just nonsense,” said Menzies. His theories are dismissed as nonsense by many academics - Menzies says Chinese fleets reached Australia and New Zealand as well as America before European explorers - but have gained an international following among readers. The urbane 70-year-old sold more than a million copies of his first book, “1421”, which argued Chinese sailors mapped the world in the early 1400s shortly before abandoning global seafaring. If accepted, the claim would force an “agonising reappraisal of the Eurocentric view of history”, Menzies says in his book “1434: The Year A Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed To Italy and Ignited The Renaissance”.
“Leonardo basically redrew everything in three dimensions, which made a vast improvement.” “I argue in the book that this was the spark that really ignited the renaissance and that Leonardo and (Italian astronomer) Galileo built on what was brought to them by the Chinese. “Everything known to the Chinese by the year 1430 was brought to Venice,” said Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commander, in an interview at his north London home.įrom Venice, a Chinese ambassador went to Florence and presented the material to Pope Eugenius IV, Menzies says. Now he says a Chinese fleet brought encyclopaedias of technology undiscovered by the West to Italy in 1434, laying the foundation for the engineering marvels such as flying machines later drawn by Italian polymath Leonardo. Gavin Menzies sparked headlines across the globe in 2002 with the claim that Chinese sailors reached America 70 years before Christopher Columbus. Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of machines are uncannily similar to Chinese originals and were undoubtedly derived from them, a British amateur historian says in a newly-published book. British historian Gavin Menzies speaks during an interview with Reuters at his home in north London July 15, 2008.
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