Wierdest Things in History?

[Lord_Iggy]

I'm sorry I brought up religion as a thing here. I wanted to avoid theological arguement. Yes, things can be interpreted so many ways. But in the interest of not starting a flame war, I'll say no more, save this.

Whether or not most crusaders wanted to slaughter Jews and Muslims, it DID happen in Jerusalem.

Now, let's end this and get onto non-religious history.

 

[Odin2006]

Columbus was a lucky fool. Most educated people knew the Earth was round and that's it's circumfrence was about 24,000 miles. Colombus, for some reason I can't rember, thought the earth was smaller.

 

[sydhe]

Columbus used an erroneous figure for the diameter of the Earth by Poseidonius (19000 mi) instead of the more correct figure by Erastosthenes (25000 mi. also used by Aristarchus and I think Ptolemy). He also overestimated the size of Asia.

To be fair to Poseidonius, he did come up with a better estimate of the size of the sun, and, although he underestimated the distance to the Sun, did better than Aristarchus by an order of magnitude.

 

[mrtn]

... Professor Carl O. Sauer argues that the Portuguese voyages were part of a planned program of exploration in the 15th century, each voyage heading further and further out into the blue ocean in search of new islands to explore and exploit (which is how they found the Azores).
...

Thanks for that link, very interesting.

 

[Maniacal]

Columbous is over hyped in the history books and popular belief. He was a slaver and got dragged back to Spain in chains.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Wasn't great in colonial gov't either.