Columbus Debunker Sets Sights on Leonardo Da Vinci/Was Leonardo Davinci a copycat?

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.

Gavin Menzies sparked headlines across the globe in 2002 with the claim that Chinese sailors reached America 70 years before Christopher Columbus.

Now he says a Chinese fleet brought encyclopedias 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.

“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.

From Venice, a Chinese ambassador went to Florence and presented the material to Pope Eugenius IV, Menzies says.

“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.

“Leonardo basically redrew everything in three dimensions, which made a vast improvement.”

If accepted, the claim would force an “agonizing 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.”

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.

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.

“This whole fantasy about Europe discovering the world is just nonsense,” said Menzies.

In his latest book — published in the United States in June and this month in Britain — Menzies says four ships from the same Chinese expeditions reached Venice, bringing with them world maps, astronomical charts and encyclopedias far in advance of anything available in Europe at the time.