Thessalonian

Ok this is totally speculative and obviously only for fun. If that had happened, could America be different today?

Would Colombus be known at all?

Marco Polo discovered America 200 years before Colombus, according to map

Thessalonian

Moreover, could Marco Polo have discovered Australia too?

halomanuk

RusEvo

Well I would imagine it would be like the Vikings...... they may have found America, but it wasn't reliably recorded, so Columbus gets the credit.

With Marco Polo, he didn't return for 24 years, and when he did he didn't exactly roll up to the powers that be with the news. He told the story to a friend whilst in prison.

So he discovers America on his travels..... may not change anything.

So how are you thinking he gets to America?

Thessalonian

He probably went there like Colombus.... Accidentally!

RusEvo

So if Columbus was inspired by Marco Polo, he would now have the sense that there was a continent between Spain and China, and he may not have tried to reach it because he only wanted to reach China. Does that sound plausible?

I don't know if its possible for Marco to accidentally find the American Continent.

Marco only set foot on a ship to come home in the opposite direction from America (unless I am mistaken). Why would he go for a year in the wrong direction? Were the ships of China capable of doing this at that time?

DemetrivsSovnemir

Vikings could take the credit for discovering America, but at that time (9th century) American continent just was'nt needed.. or they did'nt know what to do with it... but later in the time of Columbus a simple need appeared because the world was at the doorstep of a new time.. time of mercantilism. New discoveries bring new opportunities, new financial sources.

Ancientgeezer

In Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, a TV show from the 1980s, a mystery artifact was a number of Chinese stone anchors discovered off of the coast of Northern California. It was speculated that the Chinese HAD discovered the west coast of America in antiquity. A detailed investigation showed that they were indeed Chinese traditional stone anchors, but they had been lost by Chinese fishing boats in the early 19th Century. Now here's an interesting point. The Chinese were well aware of the West Coast of North America before substantial European settlement and there was a thriving trans-pacific trade between Spanish South America and the Philipines and thus China, yet there was no Chinese migration and settlement into the Americas.
In fact there was little settlement by the Han Chinese throughout their "sphere of influence" until the opportunities were created by European colonisation. So if Marco Polo acted for the Khan, not much would have happened anyway. If he acted for the Italians, or rather the Venetians as there was no Italy then, would they have been interested? They were a trading state, not an exploring one or a settling one. The Genoese were the same two hundred years later, Columbus couldn't get a hearing in his own town and had to hawk his idea around the Atlantic kingdoms. So Marco Polo brings news of a new world in the far, far East (twice as far away as Cathay, across an Ocean that was so vast that someone would have to invent a superior vessel to the Mediterranean galleys, Arab Dhows and Chinese Junks that existed at the time. This land had no riches to speak of, no cities, no interesting civilisation--not much at all really.
As I recall my schoolboy history, the motivation for, first, the Portugese voyages of exploration and then the transatlantic ones funded by Spain was the closure or domination of the land route to "the Indies" by muslims. In Marco Polo's time this was not a problem, so there was no motivation to finance an expedition. England and France were busy fighting over known lands as were the Spanish and Portugese with the Arabs so their kings would have been too pre-occcupied to finance a not-for-profit voyage.

One should also not discount that Colombus's voyages occurred just after the end of the Spanish reconquista and the pillaging of the Central and Southern American civilisations provided work for otherwise unemployed knights. The other European settlements of the Americas were all by-products of searching for a route to the Indies no one ACTUALLY WANTED to go to America.