The renaissance of a flimsy theory

Review

Menzies' conclusion that the Chinese sparked the Renaissance is illogical

1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance By Gavin Menzies William Morrow / 368 pages / $26.95

Between 1421 and 1423, according to Gavin Menzies, a former submarine commander in Great Britain's Royal Navy, four Chinese fleets organized by the great eunuch-admiral Zheng He circumnavigated the globe. Seventy years later, Menzies maintains, Christopher Columbus used the maps the Chinese voyagers prepared to "discover" America.

Despite the skepticism and scorn of professional historians, Menzies' 1421 became a best-seller in 2002. "There's not one chance in a hundred million that I am wrong," he told People magazine. Six years later, he's back, with an equally audacious reappraisal of the history of Europe. In 1434, he claims, another Chinese fleet, with official ambassadors of the emperor on board, landed in Tuscany. Received in Florence by Pope Eugenius IV, the delegation left behind a treasure trove of books, treatises and tables on astronomy, art, architecture, anatomy, engineering, mechanics, music, philosophy, politics and warfare. The "transfer of Chinese intellectual capital to Europe," and not a rebirth of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome (or the genius of Da Vinci, Copernicus and Kepler), Menzies declares, is at the root of the Renaissance.

Menzies pursues his subject with missionary zeal - and a will to believe. He is unperturbed by the absence of contemporaneous accounts of the arrival in Italy of a flotilla of hundreds of ships from China. And, unfortunately, he does not employ standards acceptable to professional historians, linguists or life scientists to evaluate the mountain of evidence he has amassed. Because Menzies gives credence to anyone who shares his views, every link in the chain of causation in 1434 is made of papier-mache.

Consider, for example, the e-mail Menzies received in 2007 from Dr. A.C. Lovric, a geneticist. As evidence that Chinese sailors visited the Dalmatian coast in 1434, Lovric cited legends indicating that "oblique-eyed yellow easterners" landed along the Adriatic sometime before 1522, and studies asserting that on Hvar and other islands, inhabitants have East Asian genotypes, non-Slavic and non-European surnames, and use a non-European nomenclature for America.